barely_amazing ovenbird I gave up on love songs a long time ago. Give me something else! I beg the collective unconscious trove of heart-felt expressions. I’m so tired of hearing the same worn lines about infatuation and broken hearts and everyone wanting to take their clothes off. Give me something that digs deeper. Give me something that expresses a feeling beyond some superficial attraction. I want to know about friendship and motherhood and the family you choose and family that starts in blood and ends in death and connections that are born of something other than a desire to possess. The collective unconscious hears me and says, “Here! How about this,” and hands me a book of poems by Shane Koyczan. I’m sceptical. I am always sceptical when it comes to love. But Shane delivers what I’m after and I read his book, Barely Amazing, in under 24 hours, then go back to start reading it again, this time out loud, because these poems demand to be spoken. I’m standing in my bedroom, disheveled and (possibly) insane, wearing a fleece Oodie with anthropomorphic avocados on it reading poems out loud to my dog because he’s the only one who cares to listen: ****** You shout into my silence like an orchestra detonating requiems in my sleep. You steep yourself like tea into this broken cup I keep locked behind a cabinet of bones ribs like thin tombstones marking a resting place for something I could swear I once buried there. I didn’t count on you becoming the skeleton key that would open up these parts of me didn’t think anyone would want to unearth the silly string and crazy glue but I grab the shovel and dig up these parts of me for you because I like you too. ****** I am positively TRANSPORTED. I’m hearing the measured CLICK of a pin tumbler lock shifting towards open somewhere in my own chest. I need more of this. I keep going: ****** You accept the weirdness in me like I am giving you a snow globe. You don't know where the fuck you're going to put it but you know that I have been put in junk drawers before. You know that I have been neighbours with broken pens and orphaned beams of staples that want nothing more than to keep it together whatever it happens to be. So you make space for me in your life. You keep me on display at your kitchen table. Granted I am still surrounded by junk but we often hold strange communion there in the heart of your peculiar palace. ****** I nod until I worry I might cause a cervical fracture to my spine. When I was a child I collected snow globes. It was a tacky and cliched hobby, but there was something about the worlds in miniature and all that glitter emancipated with a single shake that transfixed me. And as Shane’s poems sprawl out over my morning I think, this is the best celebration of love and friendship I have ever read. And I look to find that I’m holding all my own weirdness in my hands in its own glass globe. I turn it upside down just to see what it looks like, watch confetti flakes swirl inside. I feel the weight of it, the fragile sphere that is forever and always on the brink of smashing open on the next serrated rejection. It’s a little dusty and the water has gone a bit murky over the years, but when it catches the light it glows, even if there’s no one there to see it but me and a small dog twitching in half sleep on a random friday_morning. 250516 what's it to you? who go blather from