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)...

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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