For my friends

If you want to be consumed
Than gather the sticks from your bedrooms
And gather round the fire, any one
For all need tinder, all desire wood
And burn, burn till the sticks have become coals
And your eyes stinging with smoke
Become embers in the night
And if you want to become king
Than learn the ways of your people,
You shall have to know their tradition if you wish to feel the crown
Upon your head and the throne against your back.
You shall have to dance in order to hear their praise;
A motionless king can expect no better than the grave
Regicides plotted guiltless in the shadow of the clock tower

-victoria, dec 1. 2007

beacon hill park, nov 25

while watching the fading glow of the sun in beacon hill park
late afternoon, over the olympic mountains,
snowy peaks hard over a darkening cloud bank
a pair of women, facing the colours,
wrinkles and glasses around their eyes
one in a shimmery green blazer, head in a loose black car
the other indistinct but turning bright eye
the one in green to the other
"life sure is good isn't it."
"uh huh, mmm", to the sun, eyes, alight
"it just keeps on coming."

and it was dinnertime and its only a month till christmas
and monday is tomorrow morning and month and duties and duties and

Jean Genet, on the mental life of the jailed prisoner.

Jean Genet, on the mental life of the jailed prisoner.
From Our Lady of the Flowers

We occupy our minds with giving ourselves splendid roles through luxurious lives; we invent so many that we remain enfeebled for a life of action, and if one of them comes, by chance, to be realized, we would be unable to be happy in it, for we have exhausted the dry delights (and many a time recalled the memory of their illusion) of the thousand possibilities of glory and wealth. We are blase. We are forty, fifty, sixty years old; we know only petty, vegetative misery. We are blase.
Your turn Marchetti. Don't invent ways of making a fortune, don't buy knowledge of a sure way of smuggling, don't look for a new trick (they're all used up, more than used up)...

---comment---

Move this to 2007 and North America, generations rising to maturity through the television and the movie theatre and say that we're a hundred, two hundred, we're dead, we're past living, we're the ones that are used up, finished, prisoners, our dreams, our myth mined by the cinema and presented back to us as banality, as storylines. Let this be the aim of our actions, not to seize upon and exploit our longings, our daydreams but to enrich and sanctify them as they emerge and tremble...

Utah!

You take land so rare, so fierce
and make it resound with the retorts of your guns,
the thickness of your gospel,
the lowing of cattle sounds to the peaks,
while your highways hum with the speed of a false haste,
cars and trucks rushing to another destination.

This landscape has been too much,
these red bluffs, vast vacant shimmering salt flat lakes
canyons and mesas out of the plains
unbreachable treasuries of earth
their question resounds unanswered

Too much for Joseph Smith, his trail of obedient wagons,
too much for the 15 living prophets
which have followed in an unbroken line of old white men
down to Gordon Hinckley whose flock numbers 13 million
freedom loving souls waiting for heaven.

I see it in your eyes, your retreat to dull certainty,
your capital, its empty core, vacant streets
for what would you do in such a place?
the strip malls, the chains hum with activity,
your televisions pulse while you
pump the hollow music of your organs
through the temples of the church
and the congregation listens mutely,
the dream of the end
echoing happily in their heads
jumping through these days,
the fiery hills left to the lowing cattle.

Heaven, the destination loudly proclaimed
an eternal bliss of filial activity
resounding with the shouts and echoes of familiarity.

it was all a matter of chance

what if whenever they rolled up
we felt annoyance instead of fear
their sirens calling or not,
dogs and guns or not
as comfortable with dying as
being treated like shit by guys with big thighs
as comfortable with losing movement
as being told you're illegal again
comfortable squatting in a dirty cell
they'd boil into a rage
while we calmly watched around the fire
their faces hot with perspiration
unable again to swallow the hollowness of their words
the impotence of their guns,
the squalor of their cells,
men who think that white walls make a cell clean,
while an air conditioner pumps stale air through the cells
and think that fear and solitary time can
transform annoyance into respect,

but as the fire flickers
heat transforms those hard foreheads
their chests deflate and the thighs are just thick
they're just hungry for respect, scared as anyone
just their gunsdogsrecords are their way of saying they deserve it
they've never gotten it here
and know it so damn it
you should've believed me when i said you could trust me
but thats not why you're an officer
wisdom's never been photographed either
but we all know it doesn't wear stiff pants

impotence tonight faced with a hysterical woman
all they've to offer is white walls and the
reassurance of a man with a gun and a badge
so into a cell she goes
tears echoing through the door

Too Tall in the Lagoon

lying in the cemetary, besides Tomas
and Shruwski, inhaling the last of
a cigarette and the afternoon sky
behind low, reverent graveside trees
you come again, there
picking over a rock pile as improbable
in the tidal lagoon as you were in the market in St. Louis
full of exhausted americans, (arms clutching bags and bags
oil in the corners of their eyes,
pushing out the tips of their fingers
as remote from the sun as the fuel black from their pores)

stepping carefully through the loose lagoon sand
lingering on the shells you imagined around your neck
as you lingered on the fruit in the market that day,
where a man called you beautiful
and told me i was lucky as he gathered our apples
in front of his stomach
"you are like my cousin," he said
"first she hated being tall and then he realized she could use it"
then we walked away and his eyes followed you to his cousin
and i saw how wearisome being a girl
in a world of dissapointed men
could be

on the lagoon its only me and the crows watching you,
knotted braid over your shoulder bright
open jacket hanging over your dress towards the sand
past your blue jeans and long witches boots
your eyes scanning the ground
harvesting with the crows

this is how i remember you today
while the light tells me its time to get up
and put the bicycle between my legs

car free day in Kensington Market,

walking out, North of Augusta street
I stopped at the call of two saxophones,
musicians fluted like their instruments,
i watched with a crowd of five the music fading into
the flashing skirt of an asian girl who
had given herself to the saxophones and in doing
swallowed their calls as she swallowed
the dusk with flashing whites of her dark eyes
legs kicking arms beat faster than the notes
faster than the dusk as she spun wildly
then eyes closed, her movements yelps, yips

behind her the street trailed downhill into the dusk
storefronts thick with barbeque smoky
and pressed people crowned with
the flashing legs of capoeira dancers and threads of music
spells of frying meat and fall heat
all parted by those brown arms, thrust upwards
in dancing herself away, dancing the crowd anew and
the saxman had more breath, the meat more flavour
the dusk more attention

The Eaton Centre

The Eatons Centre in Toronto is shaped like an Anglican Cathedral, long, thin and tall, 25 meters, domed by glass which extends down the West facing side so that the afternoon sun illuminates the mall as it would a well-built church except that instead of saints and stain glass, the light here falls on the visages of giant sized athletes, on TV stars and shapely women, disposable saints of a culture for whom the only prerequisite to Canonization is form.

The Centre extends down into the earth and up into the sky, 4 levels with a parking garage below, fountains filled with pennies, crosscutting walkways and green plant shaped plastic creations along the concourses, plastic fronds blooming out of beds of shredded tree trunks.

Masses swam beneath the 30 foot advertisement deities, the biggest bras on earth, lips that could devour 35 penises and calf muscles that would make Lance Armstrong weep in front of his children. 100 yards long with stores fanning outwards from central walkways, each store a node selling spatialized experience, moments of immersion, fleeting accession. For this is a church that preaches accession, indeed, one could say that its all that it preaches, its only doctrine, you can overcome, just, if only, one more thing, for God's sake, you've got wrinkles, how could you seriously expect...

The consumers inhale the signs proffered here gleefully, a glittering eyed mass stiffened with sincerity, instead of silence and evocative darkness this Centre stews with the silky burble of the diverse elites who form the faithful, glittering in their personal manifestation of the consumerism of the Centre; like stigmatics livid with the blood of Jesus, these faithful are flush with the signs of consumerism, watches, earpods, jewellery, cellphones, high heels and the righteousness common to the faithful of all sects when the time has come to consume the signs sacred.

Do we worship technicity as a modern god or are we merely hunting through its products for what ease or overcoming they promise? Resplendent yet never satisfied is the consumer, never sated by worship of particular technical object, always desiring more, something higher...

The stores beckon, the best semi-religious experiences unto themselves, the late teen ivy league club-smut of Abercrombie & Finch, the sheer cost and decadence of Lady of Godiva and the smooth evolutionary pull of the mac store.

Here I linger, the store teems, consumers basking in the company's trademark clarity, the displays are purely product and information, no sell, no pitch, each device is presented on a single colour background, there are less than 30 products in the entire store although the products colour scheme changes. Theres one for each of us, pink, light green, surprise us, the advertisments say, a vegan didn't choose green?! express yourself, ex-plore.
The bright, clear light and these humble effective products bring definition which the consumers had previously lacked, faces come out of the mass, brightened through the ease of the mac brand, the assistance it gives to todays technologically enhanced consumer.

Indeed, one feels that mac is not selling products so much as evolutionary upgrades, another step forward for the subject, and that the whole store and its equipmental apparatus are merely the implements of upgrade. The ads- the Vegan with pig tails in that Field of tall grass, the trees behind, now their together, she choose pink, the thing is, its not just advertising, this isn't a sugar-chocolate ad, its a mac ad, mac consumers do love the products, these people's technology blooms in its accessibility till it doesn't appear as something properly technical, till its no different from a well used cell phone, a vibrator, an alarm clock, closer and closer, shoes, shirts, a toothbrush. Meanwhile the patterns of production, the heavy metals, the global systems of trade, these disappear, i'm typing thoughts onto the Internet...computers become invisible behind the daystar of their utility, another step closer to technicity, another silence in the history of the earth, growing ever broader, another, the same.

A world fully inhabited settles around the Eaton Centre, from the consumer, intent, manifesting content in the brilliance their church offers, dreams, sirens of purity, of garages, laughter, Christmas, aspect upon aspect, bedside lamps, loved ones and soft carpet, the consumers mind quivers and they buy again, string the dream along, outside it is snowy but the consumers warmth, their bulk of purchases, their dreams push the cold away and they slip softly back indoors

with the family,

on the red sand beaches of pei
a long walk along the retreated shore
the sun as big as a gull to a worm, as insistant
and beneath us the razor clams burrow
faster than the shovel, a thousand points of light
streaking downwards through the sand
into our darkness
the tide is coming in soft
rippling the surface sands

we return to the house by bicycle
drawn soundly back inside the walls
to gather round the kitchen table
and share our warmth
while the sun sets trough shifting leaves
and we breathe life into this lonely house

Montreal's Jean-Talon market

the things we do well
shine through the world, shine through the earth
what we share together on the streets
under the skies, rain and sun, clouds outstrip us all
markets, our music, our books of light and laughter
musicians stringing the wind and their thoughts
calling the laughter, our tenderness
tea and cigarettes together, quietly

we walk the laughter called together
cooking carrying what has been given
beads strung together

our spines are sensitive, catching the charges we can still receive
the resonance which hums within all of us
in the market i saw,
the beats of the drum,
held by a thin faced busker
his wrinkles sharing the weather,
mouth and fingers blowing wind,
mountains into these rows of stalls,
splendid with fruit carved naked for sampling,
as he confronts the visitors; their gay afternoons
with the breath
of the andes in the language of the habitants

a tourist view of three american cities

In Aspen there are cobblestone streets, biodegradable doggie bags, French fashion stores. One called Theory has black bags and coats against lots of white walls. Everyone’s white and rich. The mountains are gorgeous, many over 14,000 feet. No suburbs here, only the cool air of the mountains, snow, expensive cars and houses, money earned elsewhere and white segregation. The elites need cheap labour, they just don’t want to have to live near them or see them while they enjoy steak dinner and a clear view of the mountains. For some reason Hunter S. Thompson lived here till he blew his mouth open with a shotgun. Why? He was in the same enclave as Mariah Carey and Michael Douglas. Maybe to live as some kind of clown, parodying life in these hills?

St Louis

Riding the freeway through the suburbs and then turning off into North St. Louis, driving downtown on West Flourissant Street, brick buildings and people drinking on the street, liquor stores and fast food, hair stylists, no white people anywhere, shit, buddy bumping music in the ford sedan behind me has metal caps on his teeth. Every second or third building is vacant, garbage drifts by. We drive into downtown, more crumbling brick only there’s malls and the odd new building and a few people walking quickly by in suits, still vacant buildings, just they’re taller now, the only park is by the central library and filled with black street folks on benches and dying grass.

I ask a rich looking white guy in a suit if we need to plug the mirrors and someone in the park yells that we don’t. The suit looks across the street and says sarcastically, ‘look, they know more than we do,’ and walks away. Over the trees in the park you can see the looming granite of the five story tall city hall; a cross between the uniform bleakness of communist architecture and the threatening dominance of a Catholic Church. There’s a quote about democracy in foot tall angular cuts across the face of it, it feels like the people who built downtown were scared. They must have been white.

The missisippi river is dirty through downtown, watching the river pass and a few tourists aboard a riverboat while cars rush on the bridge overhead, a broken mirror reflecting the st. louis arch in the garbage under the bridge. The river is dirty and slow, there’s rusting metal everywhere.

St louis is the centre of America, where north, south, east and west meet, highway 66, the Mississippi, but its crumbling. The downtown is falling apart. Wikipedia says that St. Louis proper is 46% white but we stayed close to downtown and rarely saw any whites on the street, not many Mexicans either. The roads were shit. The suburbs are 30% wealthier per household and I’d say that whites have gotten scared and fled to homogeny and chain stores in the suburbs.

Hannah, a young activist who gave us instructions on the best produce dumpstering ever at the farmer’s market said that the population of the city itself fell for thirty years in a row, Wikipedia says that its peak was 856 thousand in 1950 to its current level of just over 350 thousand. Hannah squats a building in the North of the city and works as part of a collective which has funding to provide after school programs in a mostly black and Latino neighbourhood. There is a shed out back filled with donated bikes that you can work on. A black kid yells at another about drugs and how he should be respected while a couple people work on bikes. Hannah says there’s lots of opportunities and resources due to all the empty buildings and funding from municipalities but even in area of Cherokee, which would be the Commercial Drive of STL there are rows of empty stores until a row of antique shops.

And I didn’t hear any Nelly. There’s strip bars and a club where Nickleback is coming to across the state line in Illinois. Later in Chicago Illinois the strip joints are across the state line in Indiana…

Hannah tells me whites have done this all across America, running to the suburbs where they can appreciate the end of slavery and equality through their televisions.

Chicago

Drove through the suburbs this time, rich, white, rich, white, and black folks too, rich, new, chain stores, construction, chain stores. The corn and soy of Illinois give way to subway, shell and Home Depot, everything looks new and not shiny instead classic chain store suburbia luminescent. Dull neon, like everything is a fast-food sign board, even the stucco somehow. Lots of pharmaceutical stores and fast-food.

Getting closer, the roads turn to shit just like in STL and there’s black people everywhere. More smaller stores although still fast food, chicken everywhere, brick buildings again. Even at city speeds we hit a pothole big enough to fuck up Carmen’s alignment.

Then we hit North Chicago, Lincoln Park, the hostel. Its mostly white again, Chicago is a rich city, downtown has an amazing amount of skyscrapers, whole blocks of them, the city had enough inertia that gentrification hasn’t gutted downtown, only strengthened it although it is surrounded by poorer neighbourhoods in the south and west until the suburb ring. There’s a gorgeous coastline on Lake Michigan which is clear and blue, people dress well, food is not advertised only on the basis of price.

Demographically the city is split in three thirty percent each Hispanic, white and black. In Pilsen neighbourhood I didn’t see a non Hispanic person on the street for 30 minutes till a couple guys wondering over the food they bought from the Spanish language grocery. In Bronzetown driving south it seemed the same, only black, both working class neighbourhoods, both segregated. Music crosses borders though, jazz, techno and indie blending together...

The last rays of the sun met too tall frances and the crippled bard on the shores of a reservoir, eating and gazing on the sun as it immersed itself behind a hill on the other side of the reservoir. Beyond the hill was only the sun and its glowing, neither man nor mountain nor field showed itself and the shoreline looked like a cay in the ocean, the lone solid thing between the pair, the sun and the depths of the ocean.

The food was good, night came quickly, and as the embers of the sun's passing cooled, the cripple hear a truck passing back and forth near carmen electric, its lights on and then off, t came and returned. A flashlight swept the trees at the side of the reservoir. Carmen was unattended and unlocked, her petticoats revealed and visible to whoever might happen by as she liked to say. So the cripple and francis gathered their belongings and returned to Carmen.

Soon the cripple found himself illuminated by the beam of a flashlight. Darknes had not yet drawn but the flashlight cut stark contrasts into the dusk; there was the beam and there was the shadow cast by it, shadows which grew by as the cripple's eyes became accustomed to the flashlight's beam.

Behind the flashlight stood the truck he had seen and a portly figure who said 'how's it going?' nervously, 'so what cha doin?' followed . The officer moved closer, exuding unease and a doddling attempt at comradely.

Hw made it clear that he was a game warden and that it was illegal to be at the reservoir after dark unless you were fishing. He said he'd been frightened byCarmed parked in the trees and that no one was around; "we have a lot of problems with drugs and drinking abd I thought..." problems, I'm sure, thought the cripple, thats why a game warden needs two guns, a knife and a doberman chained up in the back of his truck.

Frances hadn't arrives yet and the warden began to shine his light around nervously, well where is she then? He repeated while examining the cripple's drivers license.
"I said she's by the water, cleaning up from dinner."
"Well we better go find her mom", spitz dropped from the corners of the warden's mouth like sweat from an electioner's pores.
"Canada, hey. What do you do up there?"
"I go to university in Victoria."
"Hey where is she", he said again. flashlight bouncing around till it found francis with backpack and groceries from out of the dusk. Gathering their ID's, the warden began to calm down.
"Say, you havn't been drinking anything tonight have you?
No, no we havn't" they replied, empty vodka flask not withsanding, no, they hadn't been drinking, not as the warden would've understood it.

Then the warden, more spitz falling, turned to the cripple, coming closer and said, hey, you guys wern't smoking anything were you?, I thought I smelled something down there.
Police camp, disneyland and the great fearful american flag flashed in the cripple's head as he said, no, not at all".
Soon the warden was in hisgiant truck, headlights shining on the cripple amd Francis as they waited for their identity back, the warden inside was communioning with his laptop and the telephone. Sending their data into the network to the dispatcher who was communioning with the central intelligence file, some pan-american file that had all the data the police found relevant about the cripple and frances, from the cripple's lost passport to frances' recent citation at Zion Park.
But nothing, both were relatively clean in the gaze of the machine, of mammon, the bites and bytes revealing nothing incriminating, nothing sticky, in the eye of mammon they were clean and so they were saved, as unto jesus they waved shining, illuminated by the bright lights of the warden's truck back to carmen as we drove onwards, into the town of delores, into the night, the pervasive fear which the warden moved in slipping slowly away from Carmen as she drove in the darkness.

For fear, the warden's fear, had dominated the encounter, in the shadow s of his vision too tall and the cripple had been drug runners, drunks, convicts, a whole menagerie of vivacious, slavering hoodlums had visited his bald head, indeed such a host lived permanently, had been institutionalized, serialized by a government which outfitted its game wardens with pistols, attack dogs and mace on friday nights, institutions which believed its officers officers needed to be threatening, intimidating in order to bring the law into effect.

Here was where fear passed into France and the Cripple, here was where the Warden became an instrument, an implement, a complex that could pick out of the contours of their lives the outlines, by flashlight, in the dusk, the hoodlum, the whore, the alien, could outline an almost endless succession of of types in the fluidity of their selves, their presents and their pasts.

A government for whom power was force, stripped of all its mythic qualities, of respect, authenticity. Its proof was the gun and the law, the ability to enforce the law, sure, behind the law lay the myth of America, of a law which rose out of reason, out of the illumination of rational humanity. This myth speaks of the death of inheritance, the death of myth and so provides a dead-end for all that remains for myth is the ability to describe a power which is imminent in reason, in calculation, in the beam of the flashlight.

This is the gigantism of America that Rilke and Heidegger spoke of; the sorcery of the flashlight shining eternally from sea to sea, growing ever brighter, spreading across the light spectrum, the beam turning north and south, east and west, the anti-myth, a light ignited by the code of reason.

A culture that arms its game wardens with attack dogs and an arsenal of fears; of the dark, of Indians and birth, death, people in the bushes, making love, leg hair...too many to count, fear of the sun, of sharp edges...

drinking malt liquor with Guisto on the doorstep of the Amicia hotel in las vegas

Vegas, home and standard to everything which we have developed that is of no effect and no relevance to being, everything that has stepped out, loud and echoing in the desert
everything that blooms of our accord in the baking heat;
the artificial cool of the air conditioner,
the casinos, thick with the scent and the heaviness of money, the strip clubs dark and blooming like skunk cabbage, the 24 hour conveniance, the tourism, rich, poor, gaudy and refined, the machines, the cars, so we can bear our condition in the humming of artifice, the crack, the coke nad the ecstacy so that our hovel-esqe living attains to the sublime, the warp and the woof, the neon, the neon, those colours blooming out of the trapped sun and the contorted metals of our earth, the tongues and the anuses that in crossing supplicate our tittilated selves...

paradox, mammon, that is our god, that is how we flourish,how we worship,
the other gods, silent, abused, withdraw, ginsberg's mollox our only god now
fuck me, pay me, save me and i shall go on living in this neon husk, i shall be cooled by the cool,
feel the tongues of the heat, shall bathe naked in front of the panting men, in front of all the cooling machines!!!

i give it all willingly, fuck me, suck me, the chance to win, the chance to be a king again, my fat disappears, the colours cleave to neon, the tits are all golded and luminescent...

you can laugh
and you can cry
but there's still a sign
bright caution yellow
on some straight, stucco-lined street
in Utah which reads

caution
deaf child
in area

Zion Park- in the Virgin River

The Crippled Bard and Too tall Frances sat in the Virgin River
which ran thick and clayful, murk the colour of chocolate milk
bringing twigs and bark to nuzzle their naked bodies
around them rose the canyon walls of the Narrows,
great twisting walls of bare red rock
banded with grey and browns, curving here and bulging outwards there
the walls rose for thousands of feet above, separated below
only by the muddy band of the river.

Sitting in the porous lukewarm water
the canyon filled the souls of too tall and the cripple,
thoughts chasoming upwards around the stubborn river
really no more than a creek
besides them the hard rock of the Canyon had conceded
a small sand bar to the dirty Virgin,
littered with large rough rocks from the cliffs
and smooth ones the river
had caressed till they became warm and rounded
above the rocks stubborn box elder trees rose,
their fluttering leaves rounding out the bass of the river's flowing

now and then a monarch butterfly, bright yellow canvas,
tiger eyes catching the breezes playfully
bringing the lightness of wings to too tall and the cripple's revere

all around them, in the river, a stream of humanity waded,
bound for the next sand bar, a glimpse of the next water hewn cave, or Orderville,
where the canyon had only conceded 20 feet to the Virgin,
where the canyon split mysteriously, split into three.

carrying sticks, backpacks and cameras the humans pushed upwards, onwards
upstream, Europeans French and Spanish, Japanese and Americans of all colours
children with sticks as big as themselves, women holding their daughter's
hands while their husbands immortalized them on negative,
the light reflected by their bodily masses sealed away in the darkness
of the machine until the time of the transfer to photo paper or until

Perhaps, the flash flood, about which all the Rangers talked quietly,
and which was portended by the distant thunder which came
rolling down the canyon to the humans.
The flash flood which would wash all the humans, the butterflys
and the mud down the canyon, the flashflood which all the
Rangers pictures depicted as an angry rush of sticks, so angry that
out of the pictures came the knashing and cracking, the boom of water
which would attend such a flashflood.

But no flood came. The humans kept wading past, to and fro,
smiling greetings, trading information. The canyon walls imperceptibly gave
themselves to the music of the water,
and too tall and the cripple emerged whole from the chocolate caters of the Virgin.
They headed downstream, the chasms of their thinking replaced by the flowing river,
the hidden rocks beneath their feet,
while it slowly dawned on the cripple that only a couple
hundred kilometers to the South Las Vegas sat like a
boil on the desert pulsing humming sucking water and oil out of the desert sands
while naked women flung themselves around poles,
meaty hands pushed slot machine buttons
and thousands and millions of humans dreamt and sweated...

Like a black cloud into the canyon walls, the thought of Vegas grew in the Cripple's mind,
till he could almost hear the laughter,
the jingling of coins, the rustling of extra large pants...

Welcome

Hello. I had hoped to set this up earlier as a sort of journal of the road trip me and too tall frances are on but internet in America is very difficult to find so this will just be a post of writing and observations about this trip for now and maybe other things later. some of the entries will be long. Welcome.