The Devil Asks You To Dance

You sit, sad and alone
Wondering the worth of anything
A hand reaches out to you
Smooth, soft, irresistible
Pulls you up to the floor
You're even more useless than before
As you're led along into moves
that embarrass you further
Now you wonder no longer
your worth is completely gone
A cliff, conveniently close
The smooth hand nudges you there
Your toes linger over the edge
The voice whispers, tempts you
Another step and everything resets
Start over, forget your mistakes
The hand nudges you again
Only your balance keeps you
from the critical spill
The voice is sweet, convincing
like a little girl asking for cheap candy
But you twist around in misery
back onto solid ground
Maybe you're not ready for
the story to end with unfinished business
Or maybe you're a romantic
and this can't end
if the devil doesn't kiss you enough

Telephone Rain

Waiting by your telephone
in hopes of a call that ain't coming
Checking your screens
for messages undelivered and unwritten
You dream of romance
Ballets of skin meeting skin
But all you've really got is rain
Memories of drenching sharp tears
and maybe a song or two
to help lick your wounds
Like a solider surviving combat
Eager for the frontlines so fast
But what you need is time
for the battle to truly move past

Heroes To Villains

A look in your eye
partnered with a smile
A promise, a guarantee
of trust, of genuine affection
Then the looks of time
pile upon your face
The shine of shared smiles
strained by bitterness within
A look in your eye
of fondness long buried
A promise of trust
being no promise at all

Ice Storms

I put on my Stupid Idea Hat yesterday afternoon and decided, despite that all of Toronto was in the middle of a freezing rain storm, I really wanted a discount BBQ chicken from the Metro grocery store up at Victoria Park and Danforth Avenue. I mean, it was Tuesday after all.

So I adventured up from my humble Beaches shack, braving the cold drops while slipping and sliding along the sidewalk for an entire half hour, only to find my old reliable Metro grocery had no such chickens for sale, nor was there any hope of such sales in the future. That was a fun hour. Good times.

Ice storms can be visually beautiful, but also incredibly dangerous. I remember when I was a kid in the late 90s there was a terrible one in Quebec that pretty much shut down most of the province for a while, might've even been a national emergency or something like that (I'd research into it but that's not really what I'm aiming for here).

My only personal experience with any kind of ice storm was back in winter 2013 (I think). I was living on a quiet residential side street of East York at that time (East York is a large Toronto borough if you're not familiar with the city) and I remember waking up one Sunday morning to find my laptop on low battery power, despite being plugged in. It was once I went into the bathroom in complete darkness that I realized we had no electricity.

I asked my housemate at the time, who informed me a tree branch (there are some enormous old trees in this part of Toronto) had frozen and fallen onto and broken a power line, cutting out power for most of the immediate area. Much of the food I had in the fridge I could not cook without electricity or heat, so it was a definite pizza day. I ventured out, aiming for the Domino's Pizza near Jones and Danforth.

The scene that greeted me was entirely surreal: this street and these houses, these trees and roads I'd seen everyday for over a year at this point, all of it was shining under a layer of clear, imperfect ice. It was like somebody had painted my world in its finest details, then decided to draw an extra outline around every little thing. There was something haunting yet beautiful about it. A place genuinely frozen in time, unmoving and ungrowing, yet untouchable by anything else.

I went for my pizza, ate half of it on the way, and once I was a block from my house I was struck by a bizarre inclination to cross over to the other side of the street, even though I was on the side my home was on. So I followed this instinct, walked for a minute, then watched as a large frozen branch could take no more and fell hard onto the sidewalk, perhaps in a place I might've been walking at the time. Sometimes the voice in the back of your mind catches lightning in a frozen baseball mitt.