JC Bouchard ;; p./m./ph./ap.

POETRY

PHOTO

APHORISMS & QUOTATIONS

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APHORISMS AND QUOTATIONS

INDEX

To the world.

To the great & grand gargling gargoyles with braces & blackberries. The unfortunate, the meek, the meager, my friends & brothers, sisters, the alchemy of catastrophe. To me, this heat, my shirt-less torso. The club divas, the club players, the politics of pathetics of derelict losers who stand there to watch. To skinny jeans & whiskey, cigarettes & the stains on my fingers, the girl-friends who won’t fuck me & the girl-friends who will but I won’t. Seedy bars & masquerades, social dysfunction & existential anxiety, the absurd. The questions, the principals, the fundamentals, the elementary deflated skulls of idiots & idiots-to-be. To the next Einstein or Dostoevsky. To the crotch-hole in my pants that I keep sewing. To the stars above me, the bitch of poetry, my hairy chest & tomato soup on the stove. The creeking cracks that spur the flowers to perish.

To you, a stranger, the character in the movie of my head, film burning out…

INDEX

The horror of confronting one’s existence rests predominately on the principal that one is in constant search for meaning and, of course, that the search continually turns out nil. To surpass fear it is absolutely necessary to “give up” in the greatest possible sense of the term. However, to surpass fear does not mean to be free of fear. That is impossible. What is possible is be alive with it with some sort of harmonic transcendence as an unchangeable facet of one’s permanent perception.

INDEX

Mediocrity is the only prison that gives the illusion of freedom. I don’t want to go to hockey games, or drink beer all day, or play X-Box, or get married, or buy a house. I want to pierce the frontiers of my mind & consciousness & watch the walls crack into pieces—-intense passion at the expense of only my utter boredom.

I will begin immediately with acceptance.

INDEX

The last thing I desire is for people, especially those who know me, to feel sorry for me. It would be a fool’s errand at best, & you would be wasting your breathe pushing out comforting words. My actions & behaviors are the consequence of an extremely lucid, yet impulsive process stemming from, ultimately, the philosophical principal of absurdity; therefore, the responsibility of all of these things is fully my own.

Everything I have done, I would do them again, if for no other reason to form who I am now, which I have come to fully expect & accept.

INDEX

I feel sincerely apologetic to those women who, still to this day regardless of the feminist pioneers before them, are subject to general social ridicule for being the slightest bit promiscuous. I find solace in responding to those women I know personally who feel they must explain their actions to me by simply saying, however bluntly, to fuck whomever they want, even it if may be at the expense of my personal feelings toward them.

INDEX

For the same reason I see the stars, there are certain things that weave within us. Sometimes these things pass unnoticed, when at other times they shine brightly toward us & our attention, no matter how slight, is grasped. Staring into them may be a risk of blindness. But in looking away nothing is taken, learned, or understood about them.

INDEX

Freedom means the absence of mindfulness. Neither the sound of shattering glass nor the cry of a million simultaneous voices will provide that.

Social imprisonment is barely a threat to freedom. The imprisonment of anguish as of existing is slavery of self—-a gasping shutter & then elated.

INDEX

What is the mental mechanism that leads one to think, with so much conviction & persuasion, that what one feels is felt by no other? To feel so utterly isolated, so dismally cut off & catastrophically unaccompanied, that even if someone came close who did feel as you, you would unflinchingly dismiss them?

INDEX

When I had realized that what I really wanted was someone I could be sad with I had also realized that what I actually wanted was sadness itself.

INDEX

At one time loneliness almost resulted in my death. Now it is the only thing that keeps me alive, although in vain entirely. From loneliness springs desperation, & from desperation, a reason to wake.

INDEX

The most attractive part of a woman is her apathy; the thought that she may hate me, & be gone at any moment without resolve.

INDEX

Telling people I write poetry is like saying I ride a unicycle: a mildly impressive vocation, yet, nonetheless, completely useless.

INDEX

True individuals are ghosts and dismissed as myth just as easily.

INDEX

The velocity of time varies depending upon proximity to bodies, changing according to the scale of proximity, while in relation to other bodies. If you run far enough away, maybe time will stop for you.

INDEX

“We are presented with a formal scene of reality through our five senses and that information passes through them electrically, eventually to be interpreted by a thousand different parts of our brains simultaneously, to be perceived consciously.”

He laughs. “Good old pothead discussions.”

I look at him. “This is my life. All the time.”

INDEX

Words, however poorly written, are the only thing we have to connect one person to another. For that reason I consider them sacred, and to be used with caution.

INDEX

I have never consciously tried to be a hipster, in terms of contemporary definitions, but at a show last night while drinking warm beer and smoking cigarette after cigarette, the people around me became mirrors.

For fuck sake.

INDEX

Writing while drunk is like masturbating. I become too tired before finishing and fall asleep.

INDEX

It was not them that I was going away from when I left the forest, as if my being there made the slightest difference. I left out of sheer comedy, a parody of familiarity.

INDEX

Even in the face of nothingness meaning can not escape. From nothingness comes substance. By creation alone, regardless of the means, the definition of meaning is substance existing.

INDEX

My greatest strength as a writer is that I don’t care if anyone believes in me.

INDEX

My face breaks at some cemented eyes from across the room that, although shared, are already fixed elsewhere and then blown away.

INDEX

Love is what makes my breakfast taste so terrible in the morning.

INDEX

Who we are is really who we are before we even begin to ask the question.

INDEX

I ultimately think that people do not care about me, which is the greatest freedom I have ever known.

INDEX

Doing stupid things is easy if you work at it on a day-to-day basis and very, very carefully.

INDEX

The choices we make are the choices that comprise us as people, but nonetheless, we are still faced with yet another choice, how we choose to do the making, and for what reason.

INDEX

I can only hope to capture the one moment that is in itself impossible to capture. This is absurd. But it is the inherent absurdity that drives me to do it in the first place.

INDEX

All of the vocal birds at my side once I wake, and all of a sudden silence, as if the time has passed when sounds no longer translate. This too, my life, now so loud and clear, extinguished in air, some day.

INDEX

I began writing poetry based on the presumption that I would be sad forever.

INDEX

I can think of no other time when I was at my most desperate and lonely other than when I thought that I was in love.

INDEX

Having sex is like trying to unscrew a pickle jar.

INDEX

It is the people who naturally and regularly go against the status quo who usually do the greatest things.

INDEX

The normal everyday world seems to function principally on the duality of being happy vs. not being happy, of course with happiness being preferred. And yet, I still struggle to find the difference in the two; for even now, how I feel when I am at my most euphoric and when I am at my most terrified, seem to be the same thing inasmuch as that same shocking sense of life where you forget to remember why.

INDEX

For C.G. Jung

The sensations of kissing a woman in dreams before I had ever really kissed one were the same sensations as kissing a real woman today. How could have my brain known what it felt like if I had not already experienced it? What possible knowledge rests inside me eagerly waiting to come into light? If only at will I could pull the triggers to give them birth.

INDEX

The beauty of an art piece (beauty being what makes it art) does not lie objectively within a physical piece in itself, but exists subjectively as a unique and individual emotion present in whoever might be seeing it. Art is in the stimulus of a million bodies, not in singular space, but carried in islands of flesh and bone, and therefore always changing, dying only with you.

INDEX

Poetry is the art of describing blank space.

INDEX

In the crowded room of our psyches inhabited solely by shadows the momentary sight of concrete form is bewildering, even frightening. We all of a sudden think that we are presented with an ultimatum of reality, shadow or form, as if there might be a distinction. But there is none. Where there are shadows there are shadow makers, and we may very well be the two of them, which is the most frightening of all.

INDEX

Creation can not exist external from the universe. If the source of all Creation then lies somewhere within the universe we are automatically faced with the proverbial question of what might have come first, the chicken or the egg, Creation or the universe? Of course, this can be easily answered by making the simple deduction that for Creation to be Creation it must have, by definition, have come first, perhaps somehow making the universe, for visual’s sake, to be “around” it rather than “in front” of it. But if this is true how can it continue to be regarded as external from it? It can not be. For something to have created the universe it must have totally and absolutely given itself up to the universe so that what was once a Creator ceases to be and becomes either the universe itself or some part that is no different than any other regular functioning part. Either way, Creation becomes what it creates thus eliminating the duality of the two as well as the perceived external nature of Creation. To put it in simple words, Creation is the universe. They are inseparable.

INDEX

The conception of some great force calculating and wielding the very fabric of life and matter somewhere external of the natural universe is a philosophically erroneous one, for there is no such thing as anything apart from the universe by the fact that the universe is everything. If it is not within the universe than it simply does not exist.

INDEX

Hipsterism is a contest to discover who might have the most obscure interests.

INDEX 13

Life is something that happens in between packs of cigarettes.

INDEX

Whenever thinking carefully and diligently about how to effectively improve the state of the world I am invariably lead to the question of how to change the fundamental nature of the human species.

INDEX

Writing is the attempt to translate on paper the continuous conversation one is having with oneself. This is, of course, impossible.

INDEX

Today’s generation of youth may be responsible for the eventual intellectual downfall of society because they are either unwilling or incapable of participating in serious, reflective thought. Both of these things mark the evolution of the mind, and the mind is the only thing humanity can really depend upon.

INDEX

Human behaviors that are normally seen to be mysterious can be easily explained when considered under the scope of evolution.

INDEX

The most dangerous mistake a person can make is to think that they are inseparable from the environment from which they spring.

INDEX

When I consider that all of my thoughts are nothing more than electrical impulses interpreted by other electrical impulses in my brain I become discomforted. This is only because it negates the conception that there is a “me” inside me and that I may actually exist in terms of a personality.

INDEX

Our individual identities are a composite of the various identities others have created for us about us. Without even noticing it we have all silently agreed to a contract that to breach means to risk certain exile. Through everyone’s eyes, the “other” is always the enemy, for the chance that we may be truly seen is a dangerous one. If abandonment is the price we must pay to secure our idle secrets, then our position in alienated isolation will have no difficulty being solidified, like a photograph without a memory.

INDEX

There is never a way of knowing whether there is anything truly legitimate about our existence, in the sense of a concrete purpose or understanding. The only certainty, philosophically speaking, is death. Meaning is to die. And to die to is to live our lives.

INDEX

Modern physics is only now discovering what Zen Buddhism has known fundamentally for over a thousand years.

INDEX

I am never as happy as when I reach the conclusion that I would never be happy if I hadn’t already been in despair.

INDEX

A woman’s sexuality is an ocean that, even when carefully studied, inevitability leads you toward the shore in which you began.

INDEX

Men are dense encyclopedias that contain only one word repeated over and over again.

INDEX

Everything in the world happens because of the possibility that it might not.

INDEX

There is nothing that scares people more than what other people might see in them.

INDEX

The Human being is the most extraordinary animal in the world because of the fact that this sentence exists and that you are able to read it.

INDEX

Poetry is nothing less than the hurtling toward death and how you feel as you get there.

POETRY

Gravel in September

This blank page crumples in dirty
folds while children  step lively &
muddy, finally found  poetry in a
bar drinking Tom  Collins spitting
at the familiar.  Remember when
our  notebooks  had  no room to
fill  the  brim  with  courage, the
lines        had       disappeared?

Mandala

Impermanence  in white drapes, wind
over  a  Buddha  Statue coughed out.
Electrical  convergence   in my fingers
have   burned  clean  the  snowflakes
buried   in  the  tips.    Identity.    My
brain     is    a    Mandala   knelt  over
&  my   mind   is   the    hand    wiped
through                                      it.

Room in Daylight

Centipedes  in my  bed have a striking
resemblance  to  the  bathroom mirror.
I think  if  I were one  of them I would
litter the sheets. The phone is ringing
again,   the  alarm  is   going   off,  an
invisible  push into  the  sun,  all  of a
sudden.

Exhalation Leaves

My eyes warble in shambles
on  gold-plated  plaques.  In
the  corner chiseling roots of
dead trees & how you’d find
me whirling. Lips of concrete
hammer  the weights &  air
create sounds synesthesists
taste.

Translate

I think I’ll take Ezra Pound’s advice &
learn a new language to work & strive,
& shape simple obelisks of time in
sub-text, among superfluous arks
as mountains crushing on & on.

What better way than to translate
experience into silk, stained white.  

The Canadian Syndrome

lost our inhibition somewhere
       between dirty looks & spirograph
Egyptian hieroglyphs     bone shown through fingers

(we’re all so fucking depressed
& cautious & out of our minds)

black & white photos on the wall
offer a dancing heat,      to & fro   
& arm lifts of
                  forty-creek, shorty, ballas, texting
                  & eyes of lust that share holes w/ air

(my head will cave in & die w/ me
among the grand caravans & sands

     drawing out the maps of fates
     where there gleams that face

                   & shadow)

Next to Zaphods

bottom of a refrigerator

canada’s birthday
& percussion busing      &

one clear bottle
turned to a crystal ball—-

where                            future hence
goes

groaning, the ground rule
is

whatever
the fuck
she wants        my style

being sexy in
the eyes
of
                         dancers

;

Hot Girls to RAP

axioms of the dead
share words on     pedestals
crossed out Victorian wordiness
                              spat out
on the uncool’s last morsel
of                           wit

dried in blood,        cooing like
pigeon savants

& diseased

;

Hand-Shake Me

80% of dreams coming true
halos of smoke

four concentric bruises
on his back
& legs

he laughs w/ me

to honor the death
of his kin

he predicted

weak ghosts
too

if not for the boyish
car crashing

&

some coma
after

;

To Reveal Rivers

what do i know about                poetry?

long drawn out inlets of ink stained
creases in fingers in lips             about

why insecurities of loveless        lovers
        
              even me?

Volcano In My Mouth

i don’t care about passivity     really i don’t

     (her hair left my mouth in strands of
      ash moving about the floor boards
      & yet the taste remains)

;

Climb a Mountain to Say This

ugly people act nonchalant

& mend their broken bones
w/ tongue-slinging art, tip-toe
phrases & camp fire ballads,
purposeful cracked backs &
a song to prove the truth—-

       (on a bus she’ll leave him,
        his puppy eyes & grinning
        rubbing her knee-cap. a
        half open mouth where in
        the back of she dances at
        dreaming.)

a tell-tale hand opened up that
hasn’t been told by nobodies
hiding soulless spaces in boxes,

         shrouded in the black breath of papers
         hidden in secret like the faceless long-hand
         of

writers whose secrets go unread         nonchalant

;

Between Bus Rides

inspiration comes neatly folded tucked
away on floppy disk stored properly on a DVD CD
          for once—

as the world tomorrow goes curly, mouth open
gasping in unison with the breaking waves,
          somebody told me—

poetry for sale on rideau, bank, & cumberland
next to old native black & white drawings of
parliament (a woman was buying one, or was she
reaching for her phone), a thousand people with
legs up to their necks gabbing a gory scene, talking
smack & wavering lips lose color, a shade i’d admire

            (ask me again how the sound
             of footsteps sound like notes
             choking on bone, sullen tyrants
             hung by their neckties, burning
             themselves with starbucks coffee,
             blackberries singing “ti-la-la-ta-day”)

like the gray clouds silently bumping each other,
corridors opening, laughing stalkers go riding,
crowing Homer’s Iliad, shitting on cars, whispering
fate’s sick joke in reverse, drooling inspiration
on rideau, bank & cumberland
             —for once.

;

A Mission to Dalhousie

the first city across Canada:

asking a bum to buy us drugs
when your shirt is tucked in      fedora teetering
tight gray slacks like some fuck, parasitic leech
on another leech,                     dilapitated dull teeth—

i won’t pay him, but jerry will, enough to
buy a meal or a beer or a hit a smack: whatever he says
echoes callously through the street lights & dies in our
                                                 heads, finally
a life as meaningless as my own in an exchange of
purposelessness.

                                                  ”i don’t even know anymore,”
                                                    he says

as my head shakes like a spindle spitting blood.

;

Adulthood If You’re Lucky

if you swallow a balloon you’ll die
mother always taught me,

because the
taste of
balloons, like
candy, are
lips turned
inside out
& puckered…

i’ll swallow what i want, ma. dangerously,
spitefully & masterfully hidden if must: rainbows
of dust imploding in rain, the deceased
carcasses of feathers still attached to flesh,
the smirky shapely mouths of petrified trilobites.

you’re proverbially dead & rightly so, &
although my tongue has grown to know
bitterness from sweetness, it knows not
what enters—

& i’ll die knowing that.

;

About Leaving

cuteness & sharp teeth
   
      red lipstick smeared
      playfully on some neck

a vampire walking silently
between the flames
      
      footprints trapped
      in moss

      was it lipstick or was
      it blood

being drunk is easy
& so is leaving.

PAINT

;

more coming soon…like, tomorrow