Need Machine Read online

  Coach House Books, Toronto

  copyright © Andrew Faulkner, 2013

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book ­Publishing Tax Credit.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Faulkner, Andrew, 1984-

  Need machine / Andrew Faulkner.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-77056-343-8

  I. Title.

  PS8611.A85N44 2013 C811’.6 C2013-900224-3

  This ebook was produced with http://pressbooks.com

  Need Machine is available as a print book: ISBN 978 1 55245 275 2.

  CONTENTS

  About This Book

  Dedication

  Trumpets on Mute

  Rats

  The Lobby

  Ice Cream Weather

  Don't Forget Tent Pegs

  Wing

  Modern Love

  Rustbucket in a Field with Flowers

  Chorus

  Young Liberals

  ♥

  I Think It Just Moved

  Hit and Run

  Like Lions

  Hansard

  Syndication

  Little Miss Halton Region

  Smoking Indoors

  Tumour

  At Hand

  Hot Mess

  Lorem Ipsum

  Taking the Fun Out of Function

  That's What She Said

  Like Clockwork

  XO

  This Time with Feeling

  Mean Matt

  Found: The Smell of Gas

  Notes on a Theme

  Big Sighs

  Country Living

  Small-Town Bank

  Dinosaur Porn

  Convenience Store

  Acknowledge Your Sources

  Party

  Prove to Me You're Not a Robot

  Song of the Things I've Done

  Stage Directions: Exeunt, with Flourish

  Il Miglior Fabio

  Roy Halladay

  Failure

  Cherry Cola

  A Boy at Pinball

  Found: Pre-Alpha Version of a Better Self

  Pneumonia

  Half-Hitch

  Rorshach

  Head

  Remote

  The Moon

  Passenger

  Like Cancer

  Hangover

  Amen

  Incidental

  Walk Home, Early Morning

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Colophon

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Need Machine clamours through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumour. Honest, irreverent and sharply indifferent, this book will hogtie you with awe.

  ‘After reading Mr. Faulkner’s incredible book, something happened. I began to feel bad for the person I was before reading his poems, I felt bad that I had been living without the joy and wonder of this book for so long. Faulkner’s poems illuminate the world we live in, engage in its humour and strangeness, its sadness and bravery. The poet writes: ‘I’ve strapped dynamite to your heart / and jammed a bit in your teeth. / How bored you must have been / before you met me.’ And he’s right. It was so goddamn boring before we met him.’

  – Matthew Dickman

  for Leigh

  TRUMPETS ON MUTE

  As if a kidnapper slunk off with sound

  in a burlap sack. The ransom note:

  sheet music for ‘Taps’ scratched into a vinyl 45.

  These are the trumpets we like. We turn

  the static up and roll the top down.

  Let’s do doughnuts inside the compound.

  Deep concern shows itself in funny ways:

  the faces of most sitcom actors.

  We’ve been cruelly typecast for years.

  April is a versatile name and easy to spell.

  We say, Out, devil, with conviction.

  Valve, stem of music, better intentions

  on video loop. In dog years, we’ve aged

  considerably. In the computer age,

  we’re already obsolete. The Real

  spends a lot of time on the DL.

  We never tire of the banana-peel skit.

  When we say, Out, devil, we totally mean it.

  RATS

  In the walls, running along pipes

  like a mob of white blood cells.

  Sometimes things aren’t okay.

  Rats in the pantry, the kitchen

  of the mind. Rats in the mortgage, rats alive

  and scurrying like a renewed fear of death.

  Long in the teeth, long in need.

  The change-purse hearts of rats under the floorboard.

  Rats in the upper tier of the stadium, peering

  over the railing, rats raining down

  on the field. Rats in the maize, the long grass.

  Rats underfoot, rats descending from overhead

  like it’s Baghdad, 1999, and there’s oil to be had.

  Rats the necessary gears in the mower.

  Rats only one or two removes from us –

  that is, they’re delicate and obnoxious

  and consist mostly of water. Hanover rat,

  brown rat, sewer rat, brush its shoulder off

  because a rat’s a pimp too. Norwegian rat,

  water rat, rats always the missing multiplier.

  Researcher John Calhoun built a perfect, rat-sized

  studio apartment and the rats he leased it to

  drew and redrew themselves over generations

  until they more or less evaporated.

  Wharf rat, Old World rat. ‘RATS’: worth a whopping

  four points, though given a random assortment

  of 100 tiles, it could occur again and again and again.

  Can you imagine playing with rats your whole life

  and then, like Calhoun, being asked to meet the pope?

  But Pope Paul VI was old by then and no longer steely

  or spring-loaded. So while you consider rats,

  with their glass-eyed guts that never shut,

  don’t forget the rest of us poor unblinking sinners.

  THE LOBBY

  The Holiday Inn sign issues the kind of light

  you inhale through a dollar bill.

  On the fringe of the parking lot, it’s a lot like

  the Wild West: a grave Corolla rusts,

  and someone pisses on an oak at dusk

  as if his urine were an axe.

  I commission a new scent to enter

  rooms before me and pat down its occupants,

  confiscating cellphones and sketch pads.

  It’s not paranoia if your interest is academic.

  I’m flannel-mouthed. Produce a sweat that lingers

  like a waxy second skin. In the corner, the last American-made

  pinball machine grazes on quarters.

  But the concierge doesn’t care. His yawn is wide and full

  as a luscious lash arcing over the eye of finance.

  That’s a mouthful, over the phone. Can you say that again?

  The piped-in music swells like teen acne.

  The concierge nods solemnly. He can, he can.

  ICE CREAM WEATHER

  Two coffees deep into Sunday. Cut flowers

  a little wilted, désolé. Subscribers’ attention

  l
ather-whipped by a crossword

  for an hour, maybe two, then the mind,

  which is its own beast, trots off

  to a corner and licks its genitals.

  Deft as an ASM-114 Hellfire, that stalwart

  of air-to-surface missiles, the radio

  inserts a hook in the lip. The July sweats

  are at it again. I know what you’re thinking

  and that’s not it. The air conditioner

  with its idiot whirr locks silence

  in the closet. If it’s good

  maybe it can come out later

  and we can all have ice cream.

  DON’T FORGET TENT PEGS

  Low, stubbled hills. My boots

  sweep the brush.

  The air kicked like a dog.

  When birds perch on a slipstream

  I think, I know what animal I am.

  I’ve made an orange scrub-scoured

  tent my home. At night, shadows rise

  like Whac-A-Moles and when they do

  I name them what they are: orange

  porcupine, jar of orange pencils, shrub.

  In the tent, I’m an island and everything on it:

  Mosquitos. Dead citrus tree. Lemonade

  stand. A long-beached whale

  repurposed as a hut. At times I step in and wear

  the bones like skin. Except they’re bones,

  and when it rains I wonder where it is

  my skin has gone. Is this what it’s like

  to be wet inside?

  WING

  The east wing of my heart rises like a hot

  air balloon. The west wing descends like bad

  news on the oblivious. The radical wing

  of my heart sets fire to the stock exchange.

  The silent wing gestures like a museum.

  The wings of hope trade away several promising prospects.

  Winging it at the press conference,

  despair tells fans the team wouldn’t

  have made the playoffs anyway. As a right-winger

  I’ve scored several goals and lowered

  your taxes. As a left-winger, I’m here for you.

  Attention all passengers, this is the captain speaking:

  that thing on the wing is the old god, the small god,

  all the thieves and lawyers, every good deal you’ve made.

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is what keeps us aloft.

  MODERN LOVE

  I passed, lonely as a damaged package

  in a discount bin, through a number

  of difficult months. I couldn’t roll

  my windows down or get a seat at brunch.

  I took the high road, back streets,

  stuck to shops in the mezzanine.

  But the switch that toggles my factory settings

  is a finger loitering between a door

  and its frame, caught between ‘delight’

  and ‘just missed an 80%-off sale.’ My tongue grazed

  like an ATV, and then you sidled up like an IED.

  I’m on my hands and where my knees used to be.

  According to my horoscope,

  love is a thug with piano wire.

  I’ve strapped dynamite to your heart

  and jammed a bit between your teeth.

  How bored you must have been

  before you met me.

  RUSTBUCKET IN A FIELD WITH FLOWERS

  The glitzy thing must have hauled itself

  to the far side of the ditch and rolled over

  like a pregnant dog about to burst.

  Once described as zippy by salesmen

  who use German as an adjective.

  As a minor roadside attraction it has its charm:

  cottage-bound families let their cameras

  jaw at the hull. A squat bunker

  that rain lugs into its rust years.

  In the back seat, running on fumes,

  field mice fuck like teenagers.

  The glove compartment’s loosened maw

  is a small bed for a clutch of heather.

  It’s been standing at the road’s doorbell

  for what must be years, a rough and unexpected

  bouquet thrust briefly into a skeptical life.

  A mechanical bull that, in a stunning reversal,

  hogties you with awe.

  But it’s what people want: flowers.

  CHORUS

  ‘The hour is an enormous eye.

  Inside it, we come and go like reflections.’

  – Octavio Paz

  Welcome to Toronto, on whose craggy beaches

  the Argonauts land, and lose, and repeat.

  Sweat in a brow of Astroturf, Astroturf a cold cloth

  pressed to the forehead of a fevered hour.

  Are we sometimes frigid with envy? Exactly, actually.

  I’m here. Ahem. I’m ready. Last night a friend was married

  in the echo of a rental hall in Scarborough and I celebrated

  by cultivating a slow headache. On the dance floor I swayed

  in the great electric light of four-four time. In an earlier hour,

  there were three of me: me with the untied tie,

  me in the mirror, left-handed, wielding the tie like a cudgel,

  and me in the eye of the hour trying to figure out the tie’s

  secret handshake. Toronto the Half-dressed, the Business Casual.

  I’m not the first to say this but an hour isn’t enough.

  And then the hour coming to a close,

  always closing like a salesman, by the bucketload,

  by the pailful. Our skylights, our hatchet-like bylaws.

  The timber of our ambition. This morning the QEW

  is a meadow of cars in which I lay my headache down,

  traffic limping like a waitress working a double in a cast.

  Which isn’t to say there’s not money in pockets,

  obviously by Bay, and in the hills and parks and echoing

  like the subway cars shuttling folks from hour to hour,

  the underground life, crumpled transfer in a pocket.

  I’m here. I’m ready for my costume, my ridiculous prop,

  the walk-on scene by the fountain. I’m in relief

  like the conclusion of a pregnancy scare.

  Oh, what could have been, in an hour made

  and unmade, bloodless as an insurance claim.

  City of equivocation, Great Equivocator by the Lake,

  Toronto the Retailer, the Beast from the East, Middle Finger

  to Western Sensibilities. Toronto: whole hog, gassed up

  and living better by living in a condo. This little hour

  antiqued on Queen St., this little hour drank O’Keefe’s.

  And this little city from block to block, from hour to hour.

  It’s not that I don’t like the slump and drag of Sherbourne and Dundas,

  the slow exodus to Forest Hill, Richmond Hill, Vaughan Mills.

  When grandparents die we bury their bones and leave.

  It’s not that I don’t like the concrete tomb where the Blue Jays play,

  the days’ earlier hours when I pilot towards lunch

  or the afternoon’s flashy bits of circumstance that steer me home.

  As if in the naming we could make a thing: Rosebank Dr., Progress Ave.,

  ash in the mouth. The hour a cadaver on which we practice

  and practice again. It’s the Hour of Being Hauled to Attention

  at the Corner of Bloor and Wherever; someone’s just been hit

  by a car, and for the feeling of his feet aloft, above him

  in the hour’s air, he thanks the driver by introducing a fist

  to the car’s windshield. In these ways do we bridge the gaps

  between us. Hour with a worm in its molar, with mud on the mudflap.

  At our feet the evening gathers like litter,

  a hot little mess spied in the hour’s mirrored ey
e.

  And around each corner another wildfire of strangers,

  insistent as a commercial break: we’re here,

  we’re burning up, come find us.

  YOUNG LIBERALS

  There’s so much I want

  to do. No, serious – fearlessly

  stick my bronzed head

  into a photograph’s wide jaw,

  for example. That’s leadership.

  You can really trust someone

  who does that, and I want

  to be trusted. People love people

  who build roads, and love

  is the greatest virtue of all.

  St. Augustine said that

  before he was fed to lions,

  lions that appraised him with the eye

  of their throat and found him wanting.

  But appetites are not to be ignored –

  not when they’re so logical,

  and not when campaign buttons