ANGEL OF MERCY
April 1, 2025
MEDICINE
I reach into
My angel’s apron
Their blister pac of medicine
close enough now
To the hour.
So small and so dense
It’s just enough. We call it
Self-defense.
ALWAYS ALWAYS BREATHE
This is a cross over piece for the Look show, Jimmy Bang Blues Project, and Listen Here.
SWEET OXYGEN BLUES
I find it hard to breathe (I tell you)
I find it hard to breathe
I find it hard to breathe (Lord lord)
why is it so hard to breathe
The words come heavy
My words come hard say say
My words come heavy
with what little breath I breathe
I find it hard to breathe
don’tcha look at me
I’m sucking I tell you
I find it hard to breathe
My wife and my children
My brother and my sister
You are the finest family
to love me and true me
my friends, my family
I should listen to you
you all bring me oxygen
one more time, singing
singing our sweet oxygen
oxygen blues singing we all sing
we all sing
the sweet oxygen blues.
Murray Toews – Bio 2022
Murray Toews is a “Deluxe artist” whose work spans the disciplines and media of writing, drawing, print, film, audio-art, interactivity and digital / analog hand-drawn animation that make use of thematic process-driven animation techniques that rapidly create animated shorts. He received a BFA first class honours degree with a thesis in advanced drawing from the U of M in 1992.
In 2004, he curated “Animator/Re-Animator” featuring Prairie animation with screenings in Canada and Japan. In 2012, his animated short Thought Camera, Reel One: “Circus of Objects” was the official selection for the NSI Online Short Film Festival and the 2013 Gimli Film Festival Manitoba program.
In 2018 he premiered “10 Years Before Happiness”- a subjective and allegorical autobiography seen through the youthful lens of intense emotion and surreality as he explores a personal landscape of shifting memory.
In 2022, he continues to produce and collaborate with a small group of talented cinematographers, writers, and audio artists to create short, animated and live action films as an independent artist and as the owner of an indie-driven media business called URBANSTICKMAN Productions.
PAIN IN MY NECK
July 2, 2022
I SCARE MYSELF[1]
Even with M keeping me in bed it’s dark after ten even on Canada Day. Deefer Dog is shaking between us until he’s not and the bangs stop banging. I start my journey into the night my body and my mind insisting on separate rips. I wake as my arm sweeps the tall lotions off the night table on my first pass, and see my arm dislocated, barely attached to my shoulder and twice as long. Second pass I get the water and nearly everything else, struggling into consciousnes with a deep affirmatiion from M to put up my side bed rail to corral my chaos just enough to let her sleep and stop scaring the dog.
I scare myself when I scream ten out of ten and a pain generates upside my neck bending over to take off my fake leg. The aftershocks in pieces of my mind send me to the hospital emergency, but only when I throw in the cxrying towel a week later. Taken, and taken seriously for a brain CT scan and an appointment with a doctor at the TIA ( mini-stroke)clinic. The vascular neurologist shows me my brain, unremarkable except for as small mass on my third ventricle. My body memory choses the day my son had his mass in his fourtth ventricle removed in an eight hour brain surgery to press rewind replay remember I scare myself.
The neurologist does point out one of my arteries to the brain is narrowing. Meditarraen diet he says, eat more vegetables! I nod in pain. I breathe, again. Then he moves down to the scan of my cervical spine. “Oh, my,” he says as I want him to speak, “your neck is horrible, horrible!” Those words, the word horrible exact as much as anything in this world that scares me everyday I open my eyes. My cervical spine curves the wrong way and the small tab-like disks have crumbled like feta. Still me, parts of my body scare me.
The pain I feel belongs to me, something I’ve held as my own since I was a child. Friends, relatives even doctors, exclaim, “no idea how you do what you do so much with all your injuries and ailments, you are absolutely fabulous! I wish I could have such an interesting life. Considering all your challenges you are absolutely THRIVING.” THis is why I need a new psych, to build some prespective; reality checks sure, but ignoring the tempatation to fervently believe my achievements outweigh my pain.”
How hard it was and is, to explain to my families and friends that Icanbe in severe mental distress despite success dogging my steps. I am not worthy, I am unclean, I do not deserve to be let off the hook. So I dangle like a particple waiting for a psychistrist to take me down to listen when I scare myself.
Grace Paley writes:
My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.
They said, Really?
My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.
[…]
Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.
That’s a metaphor, right?
Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.
Talk? What?
Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.
The day he thought the weight of the world was on his shoulders, he realized it was his suspenders holding up his pants.
Let’s get one thing straight, this isn’t about the pleasure of pain sex. This is about the pain of pain. How much it hurts. This is where I let it all hang out, in dispatches from inside the pain room. We all have our own pain and suffering, and it seems woefully inadequate to be sending dispatches from my torn, aching body and brain, while thousands are dying in wars and famines around this world; noisily, I persist.
May 19, 2018
“Pain is always new to those who suffer, but loses its originality for those around them.”[1]
[1] Alphonse Daudet, La doulou: (la douleur), 1887-1895 (Paris: Librairie de France, 1930) p. 16; Julian Barnes (ed. and trans.) In the Land of Pain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) p. 19
BEDTIME ACCOMMODATIONS
Shrink sock on my stump
glasses on the night table
gauntlets on my wrists and forearms
mouth open meds riding
the water slide of my throat
mouth-guard so I don’t grind all night.
Richard Hines Photo
There I said said, a diaper around my bottom
like the cartoon of a New Year’s baby (just kidding)
my body a perfect vertical lie on the horizontal
line, music quiet and classical
temperature just past the click
parking lot lights on the ceiling
filtered by my apartment’s vertical blinds.
There is no you just me taking up
as much space as I can muster
your used to be pillow carries
your scent in the memory foam
while the clock counts down
the minutes needed to pass
over time before I can die.
written June 2020 revised Jan.5 2021
1 2 10
On a scale of 1 to (2) 10 where 1 is the least pain you’ve ever experienced and 10 is the most pain you’ve ever experienced, how much does it hurt? This line is asked repeatedly in the heath sector, especially in dealing with extreme pain, accidents, life threatening diseases, or trauma to determine the location and the extent of the pain.
Sunday November 5, 10:08
“the condition” by Charles Bukowski from WAR ALL THE TIME Poems 1981- 1984, read by Victor Enns
“suggestion for an arrangement” by Charles Bukowski, from his collection WAR ALL THE TIME – Poems 1981-1984 read by Victor Enns