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...