Spring is come. I show my body who’s boss, biking top gear, running down blocks, dancing till I drop every jaw every thought chewing out my guts of fourteen hour days of not getting paid to be poor enough, trying to stay awake for the nightlife, a symptom of getting old? a too comfortable bed, but my muscles crave a mission. Go forth and multiphasic cut the floor in angles, step snap spastic, stand stalk thrill.

“Can you teach me how to dance?”

Can you teach me how to stand still.

I miss Vancouver James. He would know what to do, and he would deny it, but he’s better at people. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, is what I want to say. The fear shows and the fear is worse.

Well the Cure’s all rubber necks, hips and broken kneecaps, Suicide Commando, you’re gonna want a fist. But I don’t know how to explain something like “Assimilate,” a darksider staple in Skinny Puppy’s Vancouver. I’d stomp the shit out of that song and awful feelings feeling so far from home and close to where I come from, untamable untellable hell and hearing it now I’m all the none the wiser not dying, you’d have to put me down with a tranquilizer to get me to stop crying.

“Where did you learn how to dance?”

A bowling alley basement in Fargo, North Dakota? YouTube talent shows? Everyone better than me? Alone in my room for years, mostly. The average slice of time I devote to dancing each day/night in my tiny apartment, staining the floorboards with tire-sole scuffs and sweat till I strip to longjohns add it up! the intermission screenbreaks, can’t sleeps, can’t wakes, 45 minutes, I’d say. Give or take. I beat the mouth of my fist into my heartcage, slap the fillets of my abdomen, dance with my teeth, my spine, my spit, my third eye and no self.

Write what you know, right? what you don’t believe in, the reason you don’t know what to do. Until it makes sense. Until you come true.