1. I have to forgive cars, because frequently they park themselves in places disagreeable to my photographic motives.
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6. We met him by the train tracks one night. The name Like Thur Cheshire, the 3rd got bandied about. He followed us several blocks, just sort of chillin’.
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Early morning, 2am – 6am, I have a discourse with society’s malcontents, the drug addicts, alcoholics and existential madmen who admitted they had loose screws by committing themselves to the page. Sometimes I’m high or a little drunk, depending on how my evening went. I’ve fallen into the trap of substitution: I’ve given up my mornings and a bit of my afternoon, and now I just substitute daytime activities with nighttime ones, then for the part of my day that would correlate to an average schedule where one would do nighttime activities, like get high or drunk, for instance, it’s too late and the world has wound down, so I do some relatively inoffensive activities like writing letters or reading books.
Cytosine and I wander the Kitchener streets like ghosts. We are like ghosts of people past, incorporeally haunting a world that seems very wrong. My feet are on the concrete like a specter’s on the floor of an old wood house, and we would share that same frustration of familiarity and distance; part of you is there like a memory, but you feel you can only watch it, impossible to change the outcome like a scene on television. There, but never really there.
He carries a glass pipe that he calls Mr. Burns, adorned with the face of the Simpson’s character, and he uses it to smoke fairly dank hydro. In the low-light school yard he delicately fills the pipe, raises it to his lips, hovers the flame above the bowl like a police helicopter, pulls in until the smoke fills every crevice of his lungs, then exhales a large, playful cloud that floats off into the sky. Then he passes the pipe to me and I repeat the ritual.
None of my friends are sane, I don’t think. A girl I know, a close friend, even suggested that I’m the sanest of the lot. “Fuck,” I said in response while we were walking down the foggy train tracks. She’d been having a hard time, and was telling me about it while I balanced on the train rail, arms out like a wobbly Christ. We agreed on a lot of things that we were learning about the world:
The world is a big, scary place. The stupidest of us are on a mad rush for power, the insecure want fame, the neglected want fortune, the good want to fuck you as bad as the terrible, scores of us are mediocre in everything we do, everyone thinks they are an artist, poets are Spring dandelions smiling through pesticides and rendered bad for even wine, the streets are lined with crazies and we’re all ashamed of it, those that believe in good are marginalized because nobody wants to be reminded that they’re the bad guys, too, and life is killing every one of us but not before it plucks each wing from our backs with oversized tweezers.
Yeah, I said. Sucks, don’t it? Let’s quit and start a band.
For weeks I’ve walked around with hooks in my throat fishing for something inside my guts, making little nicks and tears in the tissue. I’ve felt a little dead and a little neutral. Heavy dry intellectual bore, balloonhead with sand, oil heart, chlorine lungs and cyanide smiles (when I could smile). I’ve shuffled awkwardly in my skin like I’m waiting in a line for something bad. I’ve invented new curses to hurl at the world, and thrown rocks and threats and cider glasses, papers, moonbeams, cat scratches, happiness and handmade pictures of Paris trying to knock the kilter little planet from the fishing wire that hangs it from the sky. I threw everything but my despair because I’m a dumb fuck.
And now I feel good. Warm, lyrical, light.
Warm like good fiction
whiskey running down into your belly
mañana maverick mashing in today
tall
and
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thought I’d let you know.
(yes, I took this picture. Look at the big one!)
I woke into a tangle of covers, noonhour late entry into waking life. Started the morning with stretches and pushups, washed my hair and pulled myself together, made a quick coldcut and tangerine breakfast, drank a single cup of burnt black coffee, checked some torrents’ status, shot off several resumes, and looked at the small stack of change on my table. Enough for a Jones soda.
I bypass the clusterfuck of Kitchener streets with the train tracks. There was marginal city planning (if any) in the rise of the old industrial Berlin, the streets turn irrationally making sickle spins, sometimes giving the illusion of a straight away until you discover a subtle curve elongated the route of point a through b by about 5 blocks. If you follow the main streets you’ll see the parallel ones turn away from each other like split ends, but the train tracks cut through them all in the other direction making a short of pretzel that can save upward to 30 minutes cutting across town. The tracks are peaceful, quiet non-places where the world seems to stop, save the flies and the sparrows.
I found my centre of balance, focused and walked down a rail from Ahrens down to Guelph street, determined not to fall even once. I did, once, but blamed it on some voodoo hex out of my control. Down on Moore, beside the cemetery I noticed something curious marked across a pane of a bus shelter. In frantic, lowercase black printing that looked as if it were scrawled out by a crazy under pressure was a long poem that filled the entire pane of glass.
I examined the poetry and the font it was written in very closely for several moments, reading and re-reading the poem. The letters formed a cryptic mess of fragmented images, something delicate and jarring like seeing the twisted insides of a fancy windup clock strewn across a table, beside the face and ornate casing – uncomfortably honest and alien.
I recognized all of the pieces, fragments of the poetry, the words and arrangement. They were mine. So was the printing. But I don’t remember writing it, and it wasn’t my poem. Just pieces, little ripped up flakes of Apartment 10 and Ravines thrown in the air like confetti, landing in this way. But it wasn’t randomly arranged, or it didn’t seem like it if it was.
I took several photographs of it with my camera phone, and cut through the cemetery to Central Market. I bought a Jones Cream Soda, and stole a pen from the checkout. I followed the same way back, stopping again at the bus shelter to copy the poem down on my arms.
I want to be barrooms
fixed-light red liquors;
stalwart image of myself
the people are desolation
dragged with bound ankles and
wrists by marching tribes of st. catherine
basement sundown
embroidered on man by cold air and bottles
unclean laundry; hallucinations
from our sun inside of trivial pills that gave him
things and places from an empty outline
of lost letters and faded fragments
I read a lot of snowfalls
breath clouds the street
freezes their canyons
windowless barren soil
laugh cracked streets;
spaces in-between those dark
reflections of politique
from far off televisions:
chinese and the whites in a welfare office
with coyote faces chatting to themselves
imaginary pianomen listen
hearing voices myself
and I swear an accusatory empty world:
“one of six people on here…
and soon you won’t see streets
of a man bound at golden glory and
then you’ll become crazy?”
have a dollar to give galaxies?I’m lying on desert drought
and we need it to feed
flower shadows
everywhere
The fortune under the Jones’ lid said:
“The deeper you go
the more you will find”.
These are cut-ups of an original piece. In this case, just something in my journal. For more on the cut-up method get your read on.
Ghost children roam in between the letters, blue dust and love and suffering.
we are frightened, conversing with linoleum, vanishing into graffiti in the tunnel
and walk up stairs holding their brown button-eyed abandonment and longing.
want to leave the world of my sister’s bark and ruin
every bit of me is white with heat
mother used to play outside of these four walls; the place where everything becomes designs, push themselves out from black-pipe nature
Build a new black basketball court
I exchange strands of information with a wounded dog snap.
Shed my skin some time later.
then there is red waste land.
then there is the only place: the word on the white waste land.
bark and ruin
shed my skin
then there is
the place where everything becomes white with heat, outside these four walls designs push themselves out from graffiti n the tunnel, vanishing into the word on the white in between the letters.
I exchange information with brown button-eyed ghost children.
I killed the man that lived blue in dust and every bit of me is wounded-dog snap.
mother used to play my sister’s love and suffering and walk up stairs holding their want to leave the world of abandonment and longing.
conversing with linoleum build a new red waste land; the only place we are frightened.
black basketball courts some time later look quite worn; black-pipe nature.
Mother used to play vanishing into the black basketball court
She would become a shadow.
The fun was that nobody could see her
and everybody was looking.
Ghost children roam my sister’s love and suffering.
Designs push themselves out from the place where everything becomes graffiti in the tunnel.
The word on the white outside of these four walls
white with heat and white with insanity:
Love.
I killed the man that lived in between those letters
shed my skin, bark and ruin
built a new red waste land
blue in dust and black-pipe nature
I exchange information with abandonment and longing and walk up stairs holding their brown button-eyes.
Every bit of me is conversing with linoleum.
We are frightened.
Want to leave the world of a wounded dog’s snap.
then there is the only place left.
I am sick of nothing and I know.
I killed the man that lived to make room for the place where everything becomes real.
Watch me dance and sway, bark and ruin.
Feed me before I want to leave the world of the abandoned hospital that my ghost children roam.
Deep down inside, mother used to play between the letters,
hide like clouds in the sky,
vanishing into the word on the white walls
You can hear my sister’s love and suffering,
blue in dust and white with insanity.
It flows through you in waves, conversing with anxiety.
White with heat, every bit of me is graffiti in the black basketball court.
I exchange strands of information with a wounded dog.
We are frightened not much of me is brown button-eyed as a child.
Designs push themselves out from black-pipe waste land.
Abandonment and longing won’t ever stop.
Click here to listen to “The 4th Branch”
Artist: Immortal Technique
Album: Revolutionary Vol. 2 ( 2004 )
The new age is upon us
And yet the past refuses to rest in its shallow grave
For those who hide behind the false image of the son of man
shall stand before God!!! It has begun
The beginning of the end.
The voice of racism preaching the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu’ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin’ to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleeza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemmings
I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I’m facin’ assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave?
Indigenous holocaust, and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin’ offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism?
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won’t trade humanity for patriotism
It’s like MK-ULTRA, controlling your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fighting for freedom and fighting terror, but what’s reality?
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children
Flow like the blood of Abraham through the Jews and the Arabs
Broken apart like a woman’s heart, abused in a marriage
The brink of holy war, bottled up, like a miscarriage
Embedded correspondents don’t tell the source of the tension
And they refuse to even mention, European intervention
Or the massacres in Jenin, the innocent screams
U.S. manufactured missles, and M-16’s
Weapon contracts and corrupted American dreams
Media censorship, blocking out the video screens
A continent of oil kingdoms, bought for a bargain
Democracy is just a word, when the people are starvin’
The average citizen, made to be, blind to the reason
A desert full of genocide, where the bodies are freezin’
And the world doesn’t believe that you fightin’ for freedom
Cause you fucked the Middle East, and gave birth to a demon
It’s open season with the CIA, bugging my crib
Trapped in a ghetto region like a Palestinian kid
Where nobody gives a fuck whether you die or you live
I’m tryin’ to give the truth, and I know the price is my life
But when I’m gone they’ll sing a song about Immortal Technique
Who beheaded the President, and the princes and sheiks
You don’t give a fuck about us, I can see through your facade
Like a fallen angel standing in the presence of God
Bitch NGHs scared of the truth, when it looks at you hard
It’s like MK-ULTRA, controlling your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view in the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fighting for freedom and fighting terror, but what’s reality?
Martial law is coming soon to the hood, to kill you
While you hanging your flag out your project window
The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn’t speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone!
And you know it’s serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they’re fair and balanced
When they’re some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don’t get the contracts to make money off ’em afterwards!
We don’t get weapons contracts, NGH!
We don’t get cheap labor for our companies, NGH!
We are cheap labor, NGH!
Turn off the news and read, NGH!
Read…
read…
read…
Click to listen to “All Blues”
Artist: Miles Davis
Album: Kind of Blue ( 1959 )
Roaming down the blue Kitchener streets with strands of midnight jazz blowing in the cool breeze. How the clouds cascade across the moon remind me of lover’s silhouettes behind a white silk curtain. I think as I approach the canal that I could go for a cigarette, or a cigar, a nice fat one with an accompanying glass of scotch on the rocks, maybe a vinyl of Kind of Blue. I wouldn’t share any of it, either.
Iris says to me in a text message that “tonight is a night to reject all forms of death.” I resolve transience, aimless wander for however long – fucked if I have anywhere to be. My household doesn’t wait up for me. It’s wise; I wouldn’t wait up for me either, and if I did I don’t know how happy I would be to see my stoned drunk face walk on through the door, grinning like a gesture or skulking like a cat, so to not disturb anyone (pretending that I can slam the door without waking anyone, see).
Wander leads me through all of the back streets, all of the side streets, all of the empty streets, the cemetery streets to the cemetery beats. The blues blasts in my earphones sound like they’re from high in the sky.
Iris says to me in another text message that “soon home will be wherever I hang my hat.” I think about home. It makes me think of stretching out real good across my bed, elongating my body until I hear a few good cracks, then just releasing all of the tension down into the mattress. This likely has something to do with the thousands of hours I’ve spent upright, watching this godforsaken continent roll past on Greyhound busses. One can’t be at home on a bus, nor can one be stretched out, or comfortable in any sense of the word.
I respond: “home is where I can comfortably stretch out.”
Down across the tracks I kick my legs out carelessly and stride with a cool swagger, moonlight’s dagger. A large woman turns the corner and stops, smiling at me. “Hi. How are you tonight?” Fine diamond cigarettes, smooth-like-liquid smoke, a phrase with soul slow licking the ear drum, chocolate, caramel and cream sensations. “I’m pretty good. And you?” She says she good and keeps walking.
Some people are weird after dark.
the hazy night's campaign against dawn. 