every forest, every night

every forest, every night; mixed media on canvas, 8 x 6 x 1.5. In the shop.

* * * * *

Do you hear it? No, it's not the wind. Yes, let's not pretend. The forest is all around us.

Do you hear it? Fine, fine.

Did you think you could shut yourself off it, from what you know is the sound of it, while letting instead your veins pulse with alarm?

Don't. You're not even lost. Being lost is nothing, and fear will be the least of it. Try to be abstract.

In a way, it's better to think of it as failure, as the culmination of an arc. That was always the inherent contradiction. You try, and try, and try, but must eventually fall short. And then, if you're lucky and thoughtful, comes a controlled but cascading kind of failure, where the flimsy reasons all tip over, revealing the heartless wet ditch that was never just a blackness.

Call it math. Call it the instability of everything.

Look: the forest lists with the corpses of kings and tycoons and communists and levellers. There's even a Lord Protector around here somewhere, mixed in with the heaps of nobodies.

You can see it now, can't you, all the little failures leading down this path, and subtracting themselves from the sum of something once imagined, while the evidence wound down to zero.

And as loud and black-fanged as you dream it to be, you should know that every ending is the cloudless same, just infinite fields of cold white quiet, but then not even quite white because nothing has no colour.

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glamour, by extension

C is friends with the fashion stylist Rebekah Roy (left in both pics above) ... one of those people who personify calm and smiling success. On her blog she presents glamour in this very sincere, straightforward way ... whether she's taking pictures of people on the street , talking about stain removers , her favourite videos , or attending some glittering party . One minute she's ruminating on hair extensions, and in the next she reveals how she's been featured on the Vogue UK site. A real disarmer and charmer (and this without meeting her yet, although I feel like I know her because we both did our time in Winnipeg). * * * * * Coming home from Russia, we did many bad things. ; mixed media on canvas, 10 x 10 inches. In my own life, the glamour is wholly imagined. * * * * * witches, smoke ; mixed media on canvas, 10 x 10 inches. My second go at this one, and for some reason I'm painting a lot of smoke lately (note to self: tell C that I want to be cremated). *

the indisputable weight of the ocean

People are always telling me that my work is too dark. So I've put up this sunnier story, but even it has a shadow, as its original publisher – a fine Atlantic Canadian literary magazine called the Gaspereau Review – is no longer in business. ---------------- It was a simple enough thing and that thing was simply this: Edmund Kelley was a gentleman. Of course his mom called him her 'little gentleman', as in 'Oh Edmund, you are my perfect little gentleman,' which did seem to hold to a certain logic that these type of things often follow, considering her affection for him and the fact that he was, after all, only ten years old. Still, Edmund himself was not particularly fond of the diminutive aspect of that title. Gentleman was enough; gentleman summed up the whole thing rather nicely, thank you. He was definitely a more refined version of your average child. He lived in a state of perpetual Sunday m

Oona Balloona (doesn't care about new tables)

Well, it's Friday, and since I'm pretty depleted in the chit-chat department, I might as well put up some pictures of Ol' Giggles At Ghosts before Grandma starts sending me hate mail. Man, what a goofball. At this rate it's going to be, like, eighteen years before she has gainful employment and moves out of the house. I mean, come on . * * * * * C is especially crazy and frantic today. About two months ago she decided that she no longer liked our dining room table (take that, dining room table! no more BFF for you!). Since then she's switched the dining room and kitchen table (and all the rest of the furniture in the house -- about thirty times, but that's another story) as a provisional solution while she scoured area stores for an upgrade. And she thought she had found one, on Wednesday, at JYSK ( Whatever , I said). But when she ordered it, JYSK called back to say that they were really low on stock, and that the stock they did have was damaged, and

red-handed

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