I am a little girl in a woman suit. Inside I play with Barbies and watch Sharon, Lois and Bram religiously. Outside I am driving at 90 kilometers an hour on the not-so-freeway of life trying to keep up with traffic.

Examine each line as though it is a fingerprint: the paintbrush of life preserving each memory, carefully folded into each crevice. Every time your son laughed, or the first time your daughter rode around the block without training wheels. All of this is there, along with the years of toil, in the form of sweat, that has stained your skin, the way that labour has strained your hands and feet. You can trace each trajectory like a rut in a local’s only back road, in an out-of-the-way town that isn’t dear to everybody, but sets the rhythm of a heartbeat for many. While some would sing the praises of botox and collagen, this is my ode to the wrinkle!

1. When you say green university, is green a euphemism for money? Is it a metaphor for the substance bled from students in exchange for the possibility of better opportunities in their future? I put a quarter in the ticket dispenser in the UNBC parking lot and it reads: “Fee paid, pay more,” as if the machine speaks for the whole educational institution. Our ancestors lobbied for free education, not fee education, but the system cannot run as it does if anyone can become empowered. 2. When you say server, is that a euphemism for serf? Am I here to aid the modern CEO vassals in their quest to engorge themselves on oversized portions, while across the ocean the peasants are wasting away, and I am struggling to put food on my own table? I once asked a ‘gentleman’ if he could please not read over my shoulder while I split up his bill. He said it was brave for someone in my position to say something like that to a customer. Perhaps the reason the USA is a military nation is that, like the Spartans, the outnumbered CEO’s fear a slaves revolt. 3. When you say human, is that a euphemism for drone? Do you see cogs and gears in place of bones and sinew, reducing the whole to a mere machine and it’s functions? I measure my own existence in shifts: nine-to-five, five-to-nine, five-to-five, nine-to-nine; the hours don’t matter anymore. Only the result, or product, of my labour is counted. Maybe someday Monsanto will create genetically modified people – specifically engineered to clean, or weld, or cook – that expire if they entertain a communist or socialist idea. 4. When you say democracy, do you mean dictatorship? Does it matter which puppet I choose on election day, when big business is pulling all the strings? I drive past the Wal-Mart in my neighbourhood, which has become a Wal-Mart Superstore with giant sliding doors like a ravenous mouth. It seems ready now to devour any ethical commercial outlets that get in the way of its super expansion. The lines between government regulation offices and big business board rooms blur, until all the faces are the same, so no one can slay the monster that is Wal-Mart. 5. When you say capitalism, is that a euphemism for corruption? Does ‘free enterprise’ mean you are free to participate in the enterprise of concentrating the resources of many into the hands of a few? I, too, am sucked, in spite of myself, into the conveyer belt world of production and consumption. To investigate the latest human rights violation I, too, google it on my new IPhone. CITIBank mortgage lenders continue to make underhanded foreclosures that contribute only to their bottom line. Where will we put our stuff when they make us all homeless? Big business doesn’t care. It’s about money, and that is the only bottom line when you are speaking to a capitalist.

Now that niqabs are a non-issue again, populations and politicians go back to arguing about economic sustainability with their heads seemingly stuck in the tar sands. Meanwhile the rest of the world appears to be more concerned with our new leader’s looks than with his ability to stave off the painful sociecide put in motion by his predecessor. Being Canadian was confusing enough before, and now we have underpinned every layered label we have with hypocrisy and drilled more holes in our own honor than we have in all of Alberta. The wheels of industries that embrace biocide for profit still continue to turn, red and white are still the separated colors of our country’s flag and everyone still ignores the keystone laying down a path that will only lead us deeper into the slick mess we have made of our environment and our economy. We may have put a prettier face on the problem, but it is far from being resolved; however, Canadians sit back and smugly celebrate the seeming success of their strategy from the serene sidelines of a battle that is barely the beginning of a war we will all have to work together to win.

I do not fit in with the girls who have pink hair and vogue scarves, or the boys who wear skate shoes and sweater vests with utter confidence. I don’t have the artist’s sensibility to toss around complicated words like I use them all the time, discuss popular underground writers and avante guarde painters that you don’t hear about at the workday water cooler or the pub on Saturday night. I am not artistically fashionable. I am the odd button on an old sweater, the extra one on the inside, in case you lose a real button; and I long to pull a loose thread in this fabricated atmosphere, unravel this place until it is nothing but a pile of string and useless buttons.

There's a green crate, in the smoking area, oddly mixed with all the yellow ones. In a prolific moment I might say it's a lot like me, but it's not one of those moments. Right now it's just a green crate, and the roar of passing cars is just traffic, not life, rushing past me like a flaming locomotive.

I am reduced to writing bathtub poetry; hoping my leopard print shower curtain will shock me into inspiration, but words do not flow like the water from my tap; drawn three times now to reheat this cauldron I stew myself in, hoping I will eventually cook up something. I make nothing but white-sauce today: a solid base that is wanton for flavor. Spanish guitar emanates from my stereo, intended to be my muse for the moment, but it dances away, too quickly, the phrases that try to step stiflingly out of my head. Exhausted I pull the plug on this torture session in which I’ve boiled my brain in the vain hope of producing one fluid ounce of bathtub poetry.

Lately I find I need to fill in space. To stretch my limbs into the fabric of the universe and say: “I am here. Like the first ocean, I am here. Surface broken, again and again, on the bones of ancient rocks and cliffs, but I am still here.” Breathe in, stretch up just to know that I am still here; to know that each illusory moment is reality; to know that I see what is missed amidst the folds of society, and that when the world particulates in front of my eyes I am seeing the truth: seeing the fundamentals of life; understanding the individual importance of each tiny speck, taking up its own minute space, and understanding the importance of just being here.

I often have to think about how old I am. It seems I am trying to forget how many years have passed me by, like signs on a highway that barely get the time to be read before headlights flash over them and they are gone. Is time really relevant in anymore than a perceptual capacity, or does it run like the river behind my house? In a constant cycle where motion is the only thing that matters. Not where you’re going, or how you get there; just the simple fact that you continually moved forward. Like the river does, I remain relatively the same, even in motion. A few of my forehead lines cutting slightly deeper, in the same way a current cuts a bank, leaving the marks of moments where it has passed. But all of those lines will eventually be washed away with the remnants of my body, and with this river, leaving only the flow of eternal energy, that even enantiodromia cannot erode.

I don’t want to alarm, or cause any harm, I’m not saying you should be armed, or move to a farm, unless that holds charm, but I have to call attention to things no one else will mention, even if it causes contention, though that’s not my intention. Truth cannot be confined, no matter how the system is designed. We need to use our minds to find the rewind button on this unkind capitalist program that has made us all blind to the overload of overcharged input changing the quality of our output, making it hard to have a positive outlook, and leaving us all on the hook for this collective anxiety that’s infecting society in the name of propriety and notoriety. Things that are fleeting that leave us competing, never completing, only depleting never really meeting. Wisdom is lacking in the midst of this slacking, backtracking, and fracking that only causes cracking, factioning and fracturing, when we should be enrapturing. Matter is a loan, not something we can own. We all die alone, so put down your cellphone, leave your tablet at home, don’t be a drone. It’s time to stop chasing, racing, erasing and misplacing. Forget about hating and waiting. Take the time to connect and reflect instead of neglecting the state of the land and the oceans, or our downward motion, or our own real emotions, that are buried in the commotion of all these options, that are really illusions. You know in your heart, we all did from the start, what was really right and wrong, even though we’ve played along for far too long in this game we’re all too afraid to name, because no one wants to take the blame, we’re all too ashamed to admit we picked the wrong seed, and allowed evil to feed, so no one can be freed, and we’re all left to bleed on this altar of greed that recedes our power to fulfill our own common needs. So I did it, I said it, I spelled it out. Believe it or not we can all do without electronic overload and materialistic doubt, so give your head a shake, take a look around, and see what life is really about.

I live on Bird/Quadrant, but it is not the intersecting street signs at the end of my block that tells me this. It is the morning’s orchestra; the notes of mother nature’s tongue incited by the fresh rays of sun that warm a song out of the feathered philharmonic of my otherwise quiet neighborhood. This is serenity: this solitary moment nestled into the frenzy of trills that overlap one another, as crinoline overlaps itself in the skirt of a ballerina.

I came here to write poetry, but the paintings are flat, and the coffee is cold. Jazz music does not drip from the speakers to flow into waves of inspiration. Instead rock music assaults my senses like a bad smell in a small room, or too much neon in one outfit. Where is the elusive, eclectic coffee bar, where artists are more abundant than coffee; where alternative describes the music and the atmosphere? I need a beret. I need a cigarette, and a sleek cigarette holder. I need a flash of the right color; a whisper of the right word. I need a man with the body of a Greek Adonis to be my masculine muse, and by God, I need a moment of inspiration! I came to write poetry, but I can see that is not going to happen here.

The smaller spacing between the tiny headstones leaves much more room for emotional impact. The loss of a young one always leaves a much bigger hole. Perhaps that is why Kaslo is a valley. Too much innocent death has carved a crater in those mountain ranges, one we Kootenay folk carry in our hearts. We have all buried too many humble bodies under tiny headstones with smaller spacings, much like these are laid out here in Prince George: A decaying garden of life that lost its bloom too quickly.

In the mirror is a sullen girl who has no more answers than I do, but I continue to ask her anyways, and I wonder if everyone knows a person who hides in their looking glass without any answers; someone who used to smile like she did. And I wonder if they wonder, like I wonder, if there will ever be another smile on the girl in the mirror.

So they’ve decided elephants are sentient now; just elephants… and dolphins. Maybe the other animals are not as silent as they seem. Maybe only we are denied the privilege of hearing the sentiment of their sentient voices because we cannot seem to clearly understand the meaning of symbiosis. We have apparently bridged the gap between ourselves and an elephant, but we cannot close the communication cavern between ourselves and the universe as a whole. We cannot seem to grasp the simplicity of interconnectedness; of how nature and the cosmos use etheric energy to make an arch between the apertures in the species and their elements. We audaciously split atoms and send satellites soaring into space without remembering what we should truly explore before we meddle with the master plan of a power we do not completely comprehend. Perhaps the animals do not speak to us, because they are too busy honing their hereditary instincts; internalizing the motion of the sun and the stars; receiving the messages of their own planet through its smallest vibrations, without needing to use a satellite. 22 While we humans can hold our gadgets high, and cite civilization as proof of the endlessness of our learnedness, we have foolishly forgotten the wisdom of ancient words adorning one of our oldest oracles: (‘GNOTHI SEAUTON’) ‘know thyself’. That is something an elephant would never do, but humans still decide who is or isn’t sentient.

The telephone wire lays limp, hanging in one spot for days. No need to pick it up, or move it at all, if it isn't ringing. Who would I call anyway? There's nothing left to say to anyone; just recycled stories that cannot be repeated with any more detail than the first time we told them. Do I really need a phone now? It's just another line to dangle off of; to clutch and wait for nothing.

To know the face of God is to know madness, said one little God to another. But what is God, really? Do you find it in the space between life and death? Does it all really mean more because of death, and that tiny space? What does it mean to breathe; to inhale these ephemeral experiences that continue to add to one another, through the process of choice, until they add up to a life? What is right and wrong if everything is determined, or undetermined, by simply going right or left? But is choice an illusion, one little God spoke softly, if this has happened before and it will happen again?

Winter has not set in yet but we are preparing anyway; navigating a mountain road, in a Jetta with a rickety wooden trailer hooked to its rear bumper, in the time honored quest for fire. Gathering firewood has become our tradition, born out of your desire to share with me your love of the forest, and my desire to avoid doing the dishes. Even though we are flanked by cliff, going up on one side and down on the other side of the car, the drive is not the most frightening part of this journey. We arrive at a suitable clearing, and you scout for a still standing dead tree – never being one to waste a life – then the real rush comes. You tell me to wait by the car, which is parked a healthy distance away from your conquest. I love the illusion of safety this distance between myself and the soon to fall tree creates, but in the back of my mind I wonder what an eight year old should do miles up a logging road if her father gets injured? Even if I were to protest, your mind is made up. I can see by the set of your jaw, and the deliberation with which you pull the cord to start the chainsaw. You head towards the deceased pine, and I watch how you slice at each side: slowly, carefully, in such a way as to predict the landing area the tree will choose. Finally I see you pull away your blade, and simultaneously I hear the crack of timber about to swoon. You begin to run in the direction you’ve decided will be opposite to the path of the tree, and I watch through parted fingers to see if you’ve made the right decision. Seconds later I exhale deeply, lowering my hand, as the tree settles noisily, on its side, into the dirt. The tension that permeated the moment settles into dust. There is nothing left to do now, except load up our treasure and wind our way back down the mountain. On the way I fall asleep to the sound of CBC News, almost safe at last.

Your fingers run gently along the strings of your guitar, striking chords in my soul. You read me as plainly as the notes on your page, each one with a different sound, and meaning. My voice aches to break in, and harmonize with your music, but you only play solos.