wings of steel

pick me up wings of steel
pick me up and to the horizon we'll go
to skirt the earth's curve and touch down
where the buildings grow thick and tall again
city to city, the rest reduced to landscape,
photo fodder, cutblocks, snow patch
and distant mountain monoliths
while I press my forehead against double-paned windowglass
short on sleep, racing against the sun, hours
lost in pursuit of the sun.
city to city, only three in Canada, mountains, lakes
hinterlands all between.

and you're right Arthur, mediated or unmediated
is meaningless when one is talking about a continent
traverseed in the span of two shits, a tea and an orange juice
swilled to the tune of a movie that wasnt written
but shat whole and quivering out of the sphincter of the spectacle;
helpless, stressed, laughing, American girls
meet singing, strapping, grizzled Irish men
and nuzzle against each other, and...it was a romp.

take me up wings of steel, I'm already yours,
already stretched before birth onto your grid,
spun alike across perception and the subdued
grasslands of Mississauga...

powell river 1

and out here i'm a speed machine too
culling away the inefficiencies
of hand and mind, seeing microsites, seeing code
loosing the hand and the clock
against the forces of agitation,

raven wings thick through the air above
watching from blowdown stump roots
I slow for a minute with you,
glossy feathers watching
eyes,
raven above leading the canoes,
echoing into my speed,
echoing through muted thoughts
stirred with thick wings briefly rustling

but i'm a speed machine today,
with shovel and trees, boot step step
i'm a speed machine again
and tonight i'll be tired, smoke flowing
out towards the bay,
texada mines and hunting eagles on my horizon,
coming back to complexity, decompression
until the morning, fleeing dreams
from the sounds of city morning,
into oatmeal and gathering towards the truck
riding sleep-heavy still along the boulevard
stretched all the way out around powell lake,
radio speed frequencies tuned to 42,
supressing sleep and the salmonberries
gradual acceleration of minds till we put our boots
step step towards the next

Bear Mountain Treesit Wednesday, Feb 13th

I woke on February 13th at around 6 AM to the sound of cracking and my brother Carl Stevens yelling, “they're here, the police are here.” I was sleeping a hundred feet in the air on Buttercup's old platform in the branches of a large gentling spiraling Douglas Fir. There were six of us at the treesit that morning, three in the trees and three on the ground.
The RCMP got the ground crew out first, within minutes I could see flashlights darting along the forest floor below, one after another. Soon I saw a group of flashlights appear around a tent near the bottom of my tree and officers illuminated in their lights pulled Jesse out of his tent and led him away in handcuffs. Still dark, I saw a dog lit by flashlight tearing apart a bag of my belongings at the bottom of the tree my platform was in.

As the light began to grow a group of police gathered round the base of the tree, shining flashlights up into my platform. No attempt at communication was made by the police and during this period they tied my rope at the bottom of the tree which disabled me from climbing down under my own power. Soon I saw my brother Kalanu, who had been in the kitchen platform, getting taken away in handcuffs by a group of RCMP officers and me and Luke, who was in the platform closest to Leigh Road, began yelling to each other, “BC Forests under attack, what do we do? We fight back, we fight back!” I found out later that no one but RCMP could hear us; police barricades were keeping media and protesters hundreds of meters from the forest.

As the sun rose, two RCMP agents began to slowly climb the tree towards my platform. The surreality of the moment; bulky crab creatures getting slowly larger on the trunk which was supporting me while sun rays illuminated the branches around me and green birds flitted through the canopy. My first sunrise in the canopy, I lay on my side and watched the light coming towards me. Already there were sounds of a chainsaw and bulldozers below.

This was it, the RCMP were calling and their call was insistent: world! World! This is our world! We will bring transformation to suit the needs of development! Get the fuck out of the way! But in my head I knew that the sunrise would fade but it was enough that I was part of the appreciation which spread through the treetops with the rays of light. Let them come I thought, the world is so deep that it can take SWAT teams, it can take assault rifles and dogs become machines, it can take bulldozers and upturned gravesites. Let moloch throw aggression into the world, charge through and pave it over, and still it will be there, flourishing, resplendent to those who can see. The depth of experience which rushes through us as we encounter the world can never be taken away from us.

As I watched the cops climb closer, hammering spikes into the tree every few feet, I remembered the night before as the treesit camp gathered around our kitchen fire pit and traded stories, laughing and learning from the fire. The mind cannot be controlled and regimented like space , our thoughts and our laughter, this is our strength as humans. And here is where those who love the world will always win, for every police occupation, for every interchange, for every straight line carved into the earth's surface, there is another moment of abundant existence. As developers and bureaucrats encircle our earth with survey tape and surveillance, we can find strength in rallying around the land which calls to us through fear and rootlessness.

After about an hour, the lead climber, Glen, an officer from the mainland specially trained in aerial extraction, reached me and I was belayed down. As I descended towards the forest floor I could see that the tree was surrounded by a couple dozen officers arrayed around the trunk in rings, fanning outwards. At the outside were officers with assault rifles and video cameras, positioned in order to have clear sight of the platform in case I had decided to resist, closer were RCMP with guard dogs and body armour. As I touched the ground I was grabbed by five officers and cuffed against the mossy tree trunk which had held my platform. It was announced that I was being charged with mischief and I was read my rights in the bright light of a video camera and led out of the forest by a half dozen officers.

The tee-pee which had been the communal center of the camp for months was almost gone and a team of workers were carting our belongings away into the backs of giant recycling trucks. I was put in the back of a police cruiser and driven to the Langford police station along Leigh Road, where I could see the true scale of the operation; both sides of the 200 meter long road were packed with logging equipment and the dozens of police cars and a mobile command centre the size of a small bus which were needed to transport the hundreds of officers I later learned were involved in the paramilitary operation. A barricade manned by police at the intersection of Leigh Road and Goldstream Avenue had been set up to restrain the small group of protesters who had gathered and I was lucky enough to see the protesters yelling shame at the police car which sent shivers through my sign as we headed towards the Langford police station.

overpasses

biking dark beside the highway,
langford bleeding into colwood and view royal
sensuous concrete streaming out
sleek jet propelled out of a molded hillside
by vast soaring columns
underneath shining rows of lights, sleek rows of lights
an overpass;
joy of a smooth concrete curve
meets the boyish pleasures of ducking under
and passing over

sensuality of a smooth cement tongue
arching over the road phallus
pressed down straight into mounds
of forest hillside womb dirt

then metallic car shoots underneath
road gliding away underneath its tires,
driver's steely eyes on the downward curving asphalt
tires longing for the occasional penetration of tunnels
but mostly making do with the foreplay of an overpass,
pantomime of cement dry humping,
cars shooting over the earth on a straight line,
destination quick approaching
earth receding in the rear view mirror

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...