Late Capitalist Sublime

rYAN kAMSTRA

KAMSTRA LATE cAPITALIST sUBLIME

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rYAN kAMSTRA

lATE cAPITALIST sUBLIME

INSOMNIAC PRESS

Copyright © 2002 by Ryan Kamstra All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5. Edited by Paul Vermeersch Copy edited by Adrienne Weiss Designed by Sherwin Tjia National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Kamstra, Ryan, 1975Late capitalist sublime Poems. ISBN 1-894663-19-5 I. Title. PS8571.A425L37 2002 C811'.6 PR9199.4.K35L37 2002

C2002-900740-2

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com

ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL CONSEIL DES ARTSDEL'ONTARIO

for Carolyn Smart "What would you do if I sang out of tune" — Joe Cocker referencing The Beatles

tHE mARQUEE

pRELUDE 1. 1ATE CAPITALIST SUBLIME sELF-pORTRAIT (wITH mANNERIST pOSTURING) iN a CLOSING pICKUP bAR sEX tOURS ON tHE bORDERLINE a fEW tORTURED pOP iCONS tHE UNBEARABLE bILLBOARD eND oF tHE rECEIVER dOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE jOHN tHE bAPTIST'S pUBLIC SERVICE aNNOUNCEMENT 1ATE CAPITALIST SUBLIME hOT mEDIUM: a tHREAT JUDGEMENT dAY aT tHE fOODCOURT tHE PRESSURES oF bEING pERFECT oN a pERFECT SYSTEM WORLD ORDER CONSIDERED aS a CARTOON STARTLED OUT oF a cOMA dISCONTINUOUS rEVOLT tHE mILLENNIAL alRPLANE hOLOGRAMS oF pOSTmlLLENNIAL eUPHORIA ST. fRANCIS OF SOCIAL aSSISTANCE (oN bAY STREET) 2. hEAVEN'S 1OW hORIZON hEAVEN'S 1OW hORIZON tHE aCROBAT pECADILLO tHE aBJECT CARNIVAL STONE CRUSHeNVIRONMENT vAGUE SUPERNATURAL dOOM wATCH & hEAVEN'S tEAR gAS pARTED dIVERSITYrHYTHMS COMPETITIONrHYTHMS

3. gLAMOUR fOR tHE hELLBOUND hOT nIGHTS aT tHE nECROPOLIS gLAMOUR fOR tHE hELLBOUND 1AST aPPETITES oF tHE CUNNING mARIA oF tHE CULVERTS & OTHER SOCIAL aNIMALS mALL rOCOCO mALL rOCOCO #2 CABARET bOYS eCLIPSED: a cITYSCAPE IN ICONS PHARMACY pHANTASY VARIATIONS oMERTA STRIP pOWER tEASE oVEREXPOSURE WHEN hEAVEN sHALL sHINE dOWN aLSO oN gENTLE tRASH 1IKE mE 4. aMBIENT dISPERSIONS bAROQUE SEQUENCE: aN eVENT iN rEAL tIME nIGHT hOLOGRAMS COLLAGE PANORAMIC nOSTALGIA fOR tECHNOLOGY fESTIVAL nIGHT hYMN URBAN rOCOCO STILL 1IFE, WITH aTMOSPHERIC fEEDBACK SENTIMENTAL pORNOGRAPHIES OF tHE fAMILY INFINITE mATYR SATURATION pROJECT tHE aNGEL gABRIEL WRESTLES tHE mARQUIS dE sADE tHE cASTLE oF pONY SCENE oF tHE pERFECT CRIME rEVISITED tHROUGH SHATTERED gLASS pARABLE oF aN eGG hYMN tO pLACE (tHUNDER bAY) 1ATEST SCULPTURES PERCY'S fLIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

pRELUDE

It's a game but the important thing is to keep it going. If checkmated, steal some of your opponent's pieces & paint them black. Have him patiently explain the rules again, taking account of contradictions, while telling him you love his voice. Introduce Monopoly pieces to the board, land the wheelbarrow on the square with his king, demand payment of five hundred dollars. If he orders you to go directly to jail then take a snake & not a ladder. Fall to the prison floor & make love to yourself in the puddles. Dance the cold floor warm. Sing honkytonk for the Devil. Eat every apple you're offered.

1. N

1ATE CAPITALIST SUBLIME

I wanna live again, I wanna live again!" — Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life

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sELF-pORTRAIT (wITH mANNERIST pOSTURING) IN a CLOSING pICKUP bAR

what you believe everything you've left behind at a pause before you've thought when bowed for gathering living waters or the rock leap of faith that unfolds language that opens Ed Sullivan Theater into a mania of applause before sender meets receiver or Lee Harvey Oswald unites a fragile world to crosshairs or firestorms of numbers overarch islands of financial districts buyers shaken, turnstiles revolving, as the fire paces an hourless floor the empire in retreat this little bouquet of flowers salvaged from the suburbs & the bulldozers as I revolt within a closing world order once more, this Friday night a distance in empty beer pints between us is in memory of a people so free, they'll meet desire equivocal as public mirrors on facing washroom walls where rushed pretty bar-goers swivel check themselves one last time who maybe thought once to crumble between a last cigarette in their fingers grasp The Truth that aches along each swell of testicle, belly or breast; or, like a CEO echoing a deep silence of the Just Life, retiring to live in a gated paradise; evenings of savage disenchantment keep us at home on either side of a bar

in the simple distances between us once were stalkers on fire escapes, parliaments at gunpoint, screams from our armpits suppressed on our birthdays; but if I could love you, then if I could touch you not going crazy for every touch I've lost, then if I outlast the perfect memory of skeptics for another try at jouissance, then if I could love you if I could love if I . . . were in a perfect world & still dissatisfied . . . were freedom freer than this monkey before me small, drunk, awkward full of spunk what I do know as a last wave closes over my forehead let me have this love

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SEX tOURS ON tHE bORDERLINE

cloud factory; marked by tungsten spotlight; like how a seagull on amphetamines jiggles; a sparkling pulse foams along a rush of green ocean. A thirty degrees gulf-stream pants around her blouse. Muffled sounds. Footprints, sandals, beach. A billboard near an empty lifeguard tower reads - IF YOU CAN'T NAME IT, SHAME IT, DOMINATE, OR HURT IT, THEN IT MAY BE LOVE. Shields her sunglasses, reading the billboard.

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a fEW tORTURED pOP ICONS "It's all over now, Baby Blue." — Bob Dylan

Woody Guthrie waits in sustained detainment washing his socks in a cement tub ass bare to a bench. & down in the fenced workyard of the roadhouse Bruce Willis throws down his pickaxe & stands with no pants on. . . . while Janis Joplin having sprinkled lighter fluid on the rusted fired-up BBQ emerges from a pinkish cloud in dawn-light her sockets glazed bone-smooth & pisses in the fire.

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tHE UNBEARABLE bILLBOARD

I saw a child of no nation before an audience of millions. Heard giggles in sky-tall places, saw desires tunnel like alleyways. I saw a sundress crawling with sandflies left to the ocean. I saw a line of jack pines that leant towards a highway. It was dawn. & police watched bright-faced children play in upscale city parks. Ponytails swished above hip-hugging jeans over upscale city blocks. The gleam from teeth on fashion runways denied the eye room to rent. I saw wrinkled husks pose for magazines, street parties down sewers, lost bodies fogged in movies awake to breath

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eND oF tHE rECEIVER

imagine: a consequence of consciousness these million or so suburb kids left to decipher where will I find a womb now curled up & mall-stylish along couches hugging themselves, wrapped safely with pillows against chests behind exits of TVs, ending the jealous night with white noise the blurred intensities which take focus only in CDs that you can buy arranged protectively under poster of dead rock star, dying rock star, inert dreadlocks lying sock-footed on carefully tucked in comforters trying out lines in their head that can win any argument happiness is a warm gun hearing of her father walking one day into the double garage shooting through his forehead an echo of security & privilege & mirrors

maybe they'll grow up an unbroken line of products who'll rise like glass elevators through an ice palace of photocopiers & many times after mom & dad will phone up looking for advice on talk therapies & third marriages & trivial global cooking who'll talk, shifting subjects weightlessly from among a bottomless pool of websites angry tourists as if bright lights were inheritance broken love lives in a fallen world of toy stores why sheltering heaven can't last another ten or twenty years look you through the eye, look you through to the cold mirror at the back of a bank machine

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dOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE

The little boy crouched in his indigo jean cutoffs his little boy testicles peeking out of the underside of his jean cuff, pees, just bobbing there. The way he wiggles his bum he looks agitated, even annoyed. Bathtub's filling up. You can see the gray curve of his back as his puddle of pee warms across the bleach tile, The window's open. The curtain billows & the summer air is coming in.

You can't smell it.

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JOHN tHE bAPTIST'S pUBLIC SERVICE aNNOUNCEMENT — for Dianna Mama never said there'd be days your unbowed stamina smells of camel hair & it's damn cold sleeping in a puddle. No community. Undershirt, long ribs, gold bodies corporate billboards. It's official. Everyone's Jesus pain of their arches, ankles, crying in a wilderness of severed malls & factories, patrolled metropolitans, scrawled over blue earth as ripe as blisters itch. Shift & flash of faces pulsing for the workplace like an SOS — an SOS — martyrs. I need to take off someone's birkenstocks, bushsocks; I want cows chewing on other cows, made mad, slaughtered as meat to tell us to our face MOO. A lost enlightenment to admit in a garden that shaggy dog got shot; financiers & superstars to stop jumping out of million-eyed office towers long enough for me to catch my voice of breath See those meticulous pink folds of pastry crescent? The shaved ham piling delicately on German rye? Tell that man at the storefront deli gimmee back my head

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1ATE CAPITALIST SUBLIME

I'm trying to be direct here: I'm trying to tell you see: there's this slim concrete ledge & a hysteria of pedestrians gathered, just screaming at you. You're about ninety stories up. I'm trying to tell you this is a metaphor. I'm trying to tell you a metaphor is as terrifying as real. Drama going on: see: you're peering over as a sterling-whirl of traffic gridlocks the rectilinear city; collectively hesitates; but a metaphor demands movement, demands either you jump or you drag your last gesture back inside the building where high-definition lighting recreates the safety of sleepovers in teddy bear suburbs cutting down your best friends, getting stoned on CDs, or radicalizing one another's hairdos. & you can work to pay off the debts on your credit cards break the speed limit in residential areas transgress your old age in seedy districts on weekends & after the column in The Globe & Post assures handshakes across the cold meat at your funeral, live on in the memory of the snapshot. But to cross the line bow passersby to lick you off the sidewalk their arms all waving, just screaming at you. If they all just joined hands, locked elbows, if all their sleeves would just weave together into a glamorous safety net of navy suits, fur coats handknit sweaters . The moon's coming up. At ninety stories you're making a quick last note of the threadbare condition of one of your two high-performance shoes.

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hOT mEDIUM: a tHREAT "In homeopathic subterfuge, you should not mind those who make you angry. You should love those who irritate you because they will teach you to channel your divine madness." - The Last Idealist, 2001

we're rats of the global village chewing at the thatch you smell us coming the restaurant scraps we've been lying in Mac Hortons, Taco Hut nosing through garbage bags in the hot sun hear us patter over tiles in your art deco kitchens or, lying in a bloody mess in the air purifier, fur & tails clogging up the dishwasher our little brown turds in the container of ricotta & while you sleep PCs diligently monitoring your heart rate while you sleep in mountain climbing equipment high-tech sunglasses, athletic shoes smelling maybe the slight ammonia of urine a rat's nest of chewed acrylic socks in your closet hundreds of hairless pink little ones there nursing at a lolloping, many-nippled mama

corner

you may come aware of a whisker, nose & chewing noise peeking through at intervals in your plaster ceiling here or there wet wee-little sniffling things sniff, sniff hullo good morning asshole let your satin sheets unfold o city of aggression & plenty if you're not going to change your dirt today we just may

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JUDGEMENT dAY aT tHE fOODCOURT

It's the time of sticky lips in the garden of earthly delights. Mouths exchange saliva & are monitored for sexiness. We eat green burgers, for free,

There's nothing left to transgress not knowing the law. Everyone is lonely, slim & touching. Sometimes they vanish just outside the zones of your vision. Playing musical chairs. Less & less seats. We appear to be losing.

Game shows for groceries. Round & round & round we go. I don't know the laws for ravished meat. I don't know the law for mad cows robbing liquor stores, When to fake it or when to take my clothes off. There are so many laws. How did the counters get so high? Everyone sing together — die! die! die! Will security crumble to Stardust for their personalities & their ideas? Will police ass-slap gangsters for their ideas & good looks? How do we compete, not knowing the law? So many questions. You, however, you I would rob liquor stores for.

We sip milk through our straws with strange determination. I grow sentimental. We get older & uglier.

Step lightly. Reality gets structured in metaphors behind those chalk-blue doors with little men on them.

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tHE PRESSURES oF bEING pERFECT oN a pERFECT SYSTEM

1. Round of applause as the sliding glassdoor draws on another bluesky at the office. She types a soothing keyboard rhythm while the saints pursue one another with staple guns, push-pins, down green corridors up silicon valleys, through hallways, on their lunch breaks.

She presses ENTER & a bell jar falls around her desk.

2. Round of applause as a field of blank weeds draws on another bluesky at the office. She restrains a frightened client while the saints discharge confetti bombs, scatter like rabbits, bop each other's brains with mythic gunfire, declare themselves emperor of city transit.

She rubs her forehead as the clock trickles sweat.

3. Round of applause as the ancient columns draw on another bluesky at the office. The saints juggle on unicycles, race against treadmills, while she coughs, clasps her mouth, hiccups up feathers, a pair of dark wet wings unfolding from her tongue as a warm dove wriggles out of the V-neck of her sweater.

She can't help but cough up feathers. The saints gather round & tug at her sweater.

Sigh of relief as waves of doves take to the street.

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WORLD ORDER CONSIDERED aS a CARTOON STARTLED OUT oF a COMA

A cartoon loses consciousness. Awakes to prophets, ministers & the messiah all piled on his chest. Passed out on the shrivelling chessboard linoleum. The cool mountain air thinning in his kitchen.

All that's left in the twilight is a headline to speak what's real is even thinkable. Otherwise, he'd swear an international cartel of glamour, cash, desire, is fastened to a suicidal mechanism. Crash & burn symphonies transcribe the music of roulette. Monopolies of the Peace map the outlines of the Grim Reaper.

Every time zone tapers to his newfound paranoia for distance. Spends nights folded up in cupboards judged & judging, with religious effect.

His daughter cleaning up after the cat's heart attack. Collection agents slip through his mail slot, have shouting matches. Even the ceiling fan demands the attention of a hurricane. Up the horizon from cartoon lane half-hatched bodies shrink their wings for safety competing divine signals shatter another year's hard rain

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dISCONTINUOUS rEVOLT

1. in pigtails holding a garden hose in zebra-print swimsuit; water shimmers from the undercurrent like Saran Wrap in a microwave; the pool overflows; long shadows she watches. Lunchtime was over half an hour ago.

2. There was a walk of fountains ridged & lipped like shellfish tinkling —

menthol-blue spotlights in the narrow sod of garden tucked against brick a light

/on at the end of the long hallway where he took one of his mom's Bic disposable razors from under the sink (he was 12) tried to saw his baby cock /off for the second occasion this ranch-style bungalow. CALL REALTOR - (905) 888-6366

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3. they just don't think, says homemade paint-bombs gone off against gas pumps in menstrual flashes of matchstick, seagull guano I'll have to raise my prices, says police cruiser pulling in at the gas station fuchsia-rose sundown exploded on aluminum siding who do they expect will pay for this, says pay in bandannas cry babies, emergency waiting rooms

with pepper spray, riot gear.

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tHE mILLENNIAL alRPLANE — for Sherwin Tjia

We're going down You're crawling up the aisle the cabin light's gone loco direct hit sir shields down you're all gussied in tabby cat jackets rhinestone bracelets your sexy legs skinny in garters crawling underneath the business class seats sniffling for the feet of your floor manager nuzzling at the toe of your middle-aging floor manager just one last time for the flat broke master SWEET DIVINE INDEX SAVE ME he's on stilettos in ass-tight vinyl his boa tangled in the air conditioning scattering parrot fluff everywhere You haven't been laid eaten taken a shit for what seems a decade you haven't worked a day of your life & you're all jazzed up on special reports exposing your part in exposing yourself to as many desert civilians as possible then sneaking thirds at the UN buffet but it's no use in calling your lawyer the pilot's not even trying to steer now he's snorted three lines of cake crumbs & fallen face down asleep in the skull of Marie Antoinette They don't want to believe it was your fingerprints they found obscuring the manuscript of liberty justice & well-being but you've no voice left with which to defend yourself you've collapsed it for a pack of fibreglass & a vial of spermicide & you're tired of benefiting the doubt you want to benefit some arid tropical island for a change & a half-dozen penniless tourists guaranteed to need you well into the next century you're tired of ejaculating DNA strands until it hurts you're tired of talking this fast Everywhere they declare war an orgasm & orgasm an after-the-boardmeeting-shouting-match at a five star post-colonial hotel but you won't admit the party's over you've just set the propeller going on your mail order dildo you just saw yourself stoned on Dutch cleanser for the first time & the kids loved it gorillas gave up masturbation everyone wants a piece of you & you know like you've always known there'll be a time for peace like there's a time for war like there's a time to live like there's a time to die like there's a time to receive but now definitely now would be the time to panic We're going down

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hOLOGRAMS oF pOSTmlLLENNIAL eUPHORIA

We approach a point of no return. down.

No up.

No hope of ever coming

Icons of Lenin & Mao drift along a ghost-index of numbers. A rendezvous with an ex-spouse in a power vacuum. Every satellite stands by for the birth of an unmarked child. We approach a point of no return. points of intersection.

We approach a return with no

No solar system whirling in the double shot of tequila. No Spanish galleons navigating black holes in search of genetic hair loss. No Bigfoot lonely for rainforests wandering the escalators of Japan. Everyone speaks very tidy English. Everyone scrutinizes themselves in private airtight domes. In funhouse chambers, clouded by mirrors. Waters so pure it would turn your hair white. The last fertile man to be preserved on violet emulsion. Eternal daylight savings & acts of spontaneous ovulation at poolside. All this to catch on in a very big way. Whatever manifests will upset the balance. Whatever balances can keep their chequebook. A little spittle dabbed just at the corner of his or her mouth. Excellent monthly flow & opportunities for advancement. Pleasures with members of species with complex nubile joints. & the monkey shall lie down with the stealth plane. The dying shall speak through the living. All of your radical friends will prove interchangeable.

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ST. fRANCIS oF SOCIAL aSSISTANCE (oN bAY STREET)

His will burn out of Las Vegas like a Pop Idol of the dispossessed only all his littered bones strewn along the highway dust. Barefoot, his snake cane hobbled yet he looks to stand along windows of the Paradise Doughnuts, wind, garbage, his trace for a moment, on average, between seven & twelve foot tall. He will ride a feathered rocket. He will rise on a hot blue Ferris wheel of peace. He shall be remembered as one remembers. Visions of an infinite promise, or some sort of homo jackoff. The tank tracks will muddy in the garden. The bullets will blow as green snow. The crown of power will begin to thaw pentagon by pentagon. No opulent force has yet to match his freed throat or his perfect ass & attendant cloud of sparrows.

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2.

HEAVEN'S 1OW HORIZON

"Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio." — an English dramatist

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HEAVEN'S 1OW hORIZON

You stand at the chicken blood ocean your T-shirt wet, your wedding veil torn, your desire soaking. A marathon crosses the finish line before you promptly drown. The sun sets & cruise ships catch fire in the harbour. So you've weathered the distance from the low sunburnt clouds through an apocalypse of language. After all this damage, there must be a message. Not a revolution of angry tourists. A show of force as level as billboards. No living signal to push up through the noise. 0 squeeze lotions of peace on this anthill of scorched lyric weeds as motorcycles roar out of heaven. The judges rush to wrap you in a towel. You're not sure a pretty throat will save you. But as you've been a singer all your life for just this life & a swimmer through bad dreams in the mirror you thank god, as the saints fold up the fold-up chairs, the earth, as gravity crumbles the theatre, an usher tugging you by one arm you throw your throat open for the sun's one last emptying kiss the janitor throwing the circuit breaker followed by sirens & hollow reeling of a distant film projector.

You arrive at the the living signal last lap, walking & the ingathering

stations of the present drifting like trash along the tracks on gossip, communing through pavement, of outbound sparks.

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tHE aCROBAT

Because gravity is in love with your shadow & the sky can't hold on to your hair & this world will hit you deep leave what you need begin falling You can't hold on to yourself forever in a mirrorball of motion. No patchwork of selves remain intact as costume ball turns Roman circus. An estranged multitude applauding, receding, rolling in space, spreading solo downwards through a concave wave of faces, overlapping, reacting, then unfolding. The net shimmering below pale black & dark white a nighttime airplane descending upon a tall lit circuit board of city sprawl may still dream of warm navels against clean sheets downtown but while a clear storm is all around in an ambient downwind nothing is more immanent than contact the dust blowing your blown head back the doves unfastening from your army boots or boa or bra strap when the stars on your gym suit fall on those days when you're not even worth talking to do as butterflies settling after winds of a catastrophe waterfall & starfall & time screaming o my planet love, don't blink follow through land standing

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pECADILLO

This is a blueprint for final World Order drafted at last, one dark nuclear morning, your crayon pressed broken on display before a watched auditorium of monkeys who raise a million hands in the ash & fallen light. It's a bonfire & a little red shed where old man Hubbly signalled for deliverance from the Moon Men was vivisected, laughed at, sewn back together, then confessed all, under spotlight, on hot smoky television waved goodbye in a credit roll of flags, landslide, flaming confetti with the force of reverse gravity thrown up as clapping rattles apart the skeletal gallery not Death, but how death's pageants unravel.

u

s

Like a family portrait of clones trying to pose distinctly. Like diminishing pathways of data seized as The Facts whether damaged or lost, pleading to glass ceilings of love, dirty water keeps dripping from Heaven's painted cracks. So you're running through tunnels with no snorkel or flippers on as the rushing waters converge fast & strong helpless but to shatter in freedom your every direction lacks the surface light of conviction. 0 long time gone fragile heart let the waters scatter your pieces, we are contained in authoritarian frames until we bloom, brighter than bombs, above twenty centuries of wreckage.

us little satellite heavens

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tHE aBJECT CARNIVAL "Congenially then, the holy scripture delivers to us metaphors of spiritual things taken from bodily things." - St. Thomas Aquinas

There was One God, endorsed by the Americans, on a scaffold in Times Square, the sun rotten, hoisting a plywood platform into a wounded blue sky just above the highest scarlet balcony where a dough-faced pope sat slumped, sipping cherry cola. His dream of ominous prophets in talcum powder wigs

continued to recite half asleep around him on Karl Marx, the Free Market, on & on, clearing throats wringing hands fervently for a gold market crash, high walls of lifestyle, restoration of the textures of division, anything to intervene, as a restless flood amassed on the pavement on the shore of a many-portaled shopping plaza

their highlighted faces alive to the skyline's silver silent office towers.

& we were awake to a buzzing in the air although still finishing up our dinner on a patio, slurping noodles, tiny sparrows showering down on us like brown spring rain

you pressing my hand in yours. A parade float of heavily armed Republican Guards wafted past us followed by children throwing flowers. Altogether elsewhere small nuclear devices detonated underground. Sparrows, spooked, lifted from our table taking to the sky in the formation of a barely beating heart. Our dishes quivering.

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An emphysemic blew a bugle. Choirboys, in ecstasies of cocklessness, burst into a peal of Beatles songs me clapping happily along although handcuffed to the table. Our soup slopped. One of your breasts popped off & rolled under the table & we stooped to pick it up clunking heads. The wait staff laughed past a pain threshold. In the confetti streets a sea of angry cheerleaders parted the archbishop elbowing his way through the struggling serpent of the crowd bearing a standard with the insignia of The Motorbike Christ beggars, chicken, chicken scattering at His advance two columns of buff Ail-American state troopers then escorted up the avenue a slow procession, located by satellite, looking harassed, yelled at, lost.

They arrived in profile. A fragile spirit in formation. & other testaments of yesterday's politic.

All had bad hair. One smoked an unlit cigarette. Some, mounted on donkeys yelled at slow traffic with what later would be interpreted as the most lurid blasphemy of harpies. High above in a chummy cluster of skyscrapers a trained million monkeys pounded on keyboards tried to make them sing. Organized at island desks over hundreds of thousands of cubicles. World organization in an obscene elision of numbers. The bull gores the matador. The human cannonball backfires. Welcome to Final World Order. Fade to orchestration, credit roll, static.

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You who find a quiet corner away from the bidding on The Carnival, you invoke old names of The Carnival's junk loves. You who move to streamline sewage systems of The Carnival, you who buy, shout, sell even during The Carnival's funeral march . . . these ideograms, recursive holograms that begin with opening their beaks stretching out their necks, opening their wings bowing heads in penance or nodding off during the trial, a plaza of heads receding into smudged parchment. Two outstretched fingers, three sets of rays attached to the nimbus at the crown of the head, posthumous, inflowing, five wounds, three in the tongue, two at the back of the head, lead chests, broken tent of cinders, poured on dry leaves flames rising swiftly up mushroom cloud spiralling as the water reaches a mark of reverse devastation bodies, icon, world angle at which a diver touches ground

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sTONE CRUSH eNVIRONMENT

golden dust on the valleys of low income housing golden dust on the sites of embedded pain golden dust on the mirroring of condos & lockdowns & state

all the royal pirates in England all the hungry dungeons of France didn't arrive to deliver gifts of freedom

all the food courts of the Americas sunk sovereignty's worldwide sunshine embrace between the blood loans of race

the circuits of the poor have lit this capitalist mirrorball

this is no disco

our lady grain is in the shelters the scattered prayers

all the nuclear powers would not lift them the last ambulance out of paradise steered clear

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VAGUE SUPERNATURAL dOOM wATCH

Sorry, said a president pointing to the broken airplane in the sky. I'm sorry, he said to the bread & roses swollen there like teardrops,

& for years there was nothing only callous children hugging bruised knees in concrete stillness.

murderer, whispered the trickling porcelain toilet.

murderer, screamed the night through the liquid aquarium of my dreams. Cred water, red water)

You can tie up the phones. Float parliament over the twilight.

(murderer)

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& HEAVEN'S tEAR gAS pARTED Empty cities. Driveways of rainfall. Empty borders, growing prisons. Grain, rice, millet, spaghetti, noodles, prisons. Mother, the truckers are angry. A diamond highway embattled & blockaded.

If this world were one body (at night I imagine a world of one body) who on earth would sleep beside us?

We must be like closed condoms shrivelled under feet of a chanting street: no dreams no peace no relief

who train brave children as secret commandos by firing at them.

I'm not clever. These are not our streets. This is what flying with your eyes shut is like This is how a world jumps orbit, says look no hands

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dIVERSITY rHYTHMS

The frogs chirp on the bone trees. The pigs move in. Snout around the roots. Establish themselves as founder pigs. The piglets can tell you all you need to know about pigs. The frogs chirp on the bone trees. The pigs tunnel under roots & set up counters at the entrances. The bone trees are surrounded. They charge admission at those counters. The frogs chirp on the bone trees. The pigs enjoy the finer things. Cream puffs, truffles, a violent slab of pork. All food moves through those tunnels. They charge admission at those counters. The frogs chirp on the bone trees. The pigs have had too much. Giddy pigs shoot other pigs for hoarding. Monitor frogs & bears & crows & rats for stealing. & most certainly a crime has taken place, a crime hangs always just in the air, but the pigs must tunnel, set up counters, charge admission at those counters. Monitor frogs & bears & crows & rats for stealing. For the pigs enjoy the finer things & the piglets can tell you all you need to know about pigs.

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COMPETITION rHYTHMS

On our left we have Archie Andrews blistered in cold green flames. Twelve cowboys twirling gold-embossed bullwhips. An upper opera tier of ailing grooms & princesses shaving one another's legs over a last chalice of beer. On our right we have two sparrows a nest of weeds & a tiny dry river.

On our left we have a chandelier for limpid faeries, guns cocked on scabby knees. Defeated models lying in a sensual mass under decomposing fur coats, Salvations of eel-eyed children haunting the TVs bound for gunless wars over spare breakfast cereals. On our right we have two sparrows a nest of weeds & a tiny dry river.

On our left we have wasp colonies of papier-mache high-rises & condominiums. Laundry lines fastening an eternity of broken neighbourhoods. Kill to get in, kill to get out, many hobgoblins huddling a pouting wound under the domination tree. On our right we have two sparrows a nest of weeds & a tiny dry river.

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3.

gLAMOUR fOR tHE hELLBOUND

"If I'm gonna go down, I'm gonna do it in style." — Ani DiFranco

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hOT nIGHTS at tHE nECROPOLIS "It was either kill myself, kill her, or move to B.C." — a man on his way to B.C.

This is my last lap. End of the line. My Los Angeles of patience. At last I'm holding it together. Clear sky for miles. Hydrotowers. A sun is shining double. My angels clasp their wings in the smoky grillhouse light. The once degraded, the more desired. Tea-boys cash in on flat-breasted senators in tunics. Under filthy flirty dresses they play with the smooth bulbous flesh of no sex. Bullfights; knife fights; shadow boxing. We came in here because I was a little bit in love with you & you'd just cut the throat of your stupid boyfriend. We no longer sing songs of new orders of new murders or of new freedoms There's a stage with a brass rail; that's all the soldiers dream of. We believe in everything. Our leaders have exterminated our dying. When it got very crowded on top we got really close to the ground. We who were rumoured once as being the last great poets among the scholars of the hellbound. Like Moses, puzzled look upon a parting sea of freeways. With King David, dividing lots among a windy kingdom of salt pillars. Like Lily, biting Eve in either artery of her neck in need in a run-off of secret reeds. So fuck the office jobs of the gentiles. This work is easy & frankly we need the money. The evening's peace makes love like gentle wasps around garbage of mountain monasteries. Anyways, today it's hot & I'm in communion with bad demons.

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gLAMOUR fOR tHE hELLBOUND "Am I dead, or are you dead?" — a joke among enlightened corpses, 4000 BC The scars on my mattress now turn as blonde as the dust. The sex & weightlessness of the dead. We were like children lit up by invisible cinders. God leaves you on a park bench. Jupiter rises over a gas station. Tender pedophiles fall dreaming against steering wheels at last in cells of private weeds. Life is a slow burn, forgetting, desire. Babies & dirty needles. A same brown mole on our noses. We shared Marilyn Monroe's caress or curse. Manufacturer's recall. Hungrier than the sun. A liar like the moon. I went down. You channelled voices. Your Walkman, slow mountains, Vancouver. You'd found yourself at last like a shining porn star among the lost, Too pure visions of a moneyed gunland left you to your twilight as a medium. Held hands with public beaches like a brass pole. Warm oceans, pitiless. Vomit & territory & more visions not guiding nor enforced. I want to lie all over your cracked magic now like a beach tapestry. A salty wind which was only the howling gnosis of the toilet god. Glass ceilings laughed to pieces on the designer pills of dilettantes. I grew skid marks on my innocence. Swallowed crushes. Walked away from holiness. This mole I rub up the neck of loved ones now like my most precious possession. You went down. I turned twenty-five. No amount of adult video stores had prepared me. Neoclassical facades. Behind, the limos prey on us. Like a subway crashes into shelf after shelf of Pharmaceuticals, like you've come in here a schoolboy, but you must leave either a striptease, or schoolboy's hero

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1AST aPPETITES OF tHE CUNNING

That last time after the knockout round it was all a faerie tale. The rice raining down like starfall on cathedral stairs. Mathematicians exchange intimate heat under vaulted ceilings. Your heart still alive. Flashes of mime-faces in crowds. Paparazzi, photobulbs. Those we married for money growing flowers at the tanning salon. Those we waited to love playing with their ears & wanting us. Sprinklers of money from Thunder Bay to lush lawns of Africa. Years did not heal us. Time, in the end, preferred to keep us sick. & no pardons came. Yet the prisons unlocked across the wet soccer fields of autumn. & heaven's teargas parted & the moon shone down as always on the ripped shirt of the sea. & no one was left to bitch or gossip about freedom. Not hot boys ungrateful for lap dances with warm handguns on their laps. The doves & UN soldiers blown away on a funeral parade of limos out of order, out of sequence. & I would marry you over & over & over in braids of lavender of mosquito of mermaid. & our wedding photos would burn like the sweet life for the mothers of the poor. There are no more dreams outside these dreams. We are born with bright blood on our face licking yolk off of one another's swollen tongues. No loop of perfect music to generate always & without decay. Tomorrow maybe lambs of war descend to declare everyone president in the crooked towers of our labour. But we are not who we say we are. We are damaged. Some days, dragon days. This world, too soon. Like catwalks, we want something to fall down on us lonely, dirty, petty, ebullient, funny. & cash can burn in stolen cars. You are all I have on credit.

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mARIA oF tHE CULVERTS Maria of the sky-blue veil, laughing, with a necktie of corpses. O cloudy vinyl eyebrows. O seashell-studded ankle. 0 shoelace caught in a throat of a sparrow, jiggling. 1 know why the midnite divas, Maria, the bitches, smell us out. We are whores to ourselves only. They'd prefer a retractable cunt or cock someone clean who will live without mirrors or for moments in only mirrored ballrooms. Who'll throw us out, or say they will & then don't & never call, We are like culverts down by the ocean. Rusted, solitary, could go on forever. You are so lifelike; 0 aimless nights of streets. Why do you come when you're beat up & give the sign of peace? Maria, why do you come just when 1 should have gone to bed? 0 Maria, I know that angels have been fucking with my head. 1 just don't care anymore. I like the jukebox, the bartender who pets me, the video games. I don't care, I don't care. Let the takers take all that I wanted to share. You are the fur jacket I always wanted to wear. Champagne Jacuzzis high above our private movies. A favourite shade of mascara, a same tattoo of dagger.

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& OTHER SOCIAL aNIMALS "I feel like I just won the lottery." — line spoken on a first date

you've not showered a warning you would traipse your pepper over the distinct trace, scent or crawl of any girl/boyfriend raising your arms in a waterfall of hair shimmying near floodlights orange crewcut bent wrist you repeat with subtle variations how if things don't pan out for you as hurt & famous in Toronto you're giving yourself over to hard drugs gratuitous sex through all this, a tired scratch played under your voice like a needle had just skipped over the record of your existence. & I loved how you lied, losing no time from the ecstatic to the lush daring me to indulge you knees together in a loose cotton dress marked by fatal contradictions & stalling fatal years passing. Chain-link, mass transit, former allies. Someone makes you over in her mouth melts you to a solvent salty-paste your sudden queerness your pierced spirit how you've vanished to Mexico to galas hosted by the American mob "Be real," she warns "Be real," a biker ex-psychic once warned me over a beer. I was lonely, he was just out of jail. Reality honing closer that night around our table than the flesh-loyalty of a tattoo you're something else . . .

& I think of you guitar strap slung over your right shoulder shooting up payphones in the lobby of a Marineland somewhere

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mALL rOCOCO Having edged her bone finger along the cubic-display glass of sun-amber colognes, the disembodied motorcycle jacket & patched combat boots, glides up the green-polished aisle towards the exit, a slackened fishnet stocking dangling from a smooth mannequin's leg that she stole tucked under her side & gets as far as the first red set of traffic lights before a floor walker grabs her around her elbow pulling her hard enough to him that she looks like she's fighting a police barricade to hug a Beatle. In the backroom, with mouth dark like wet tar, she keeps tight-lipped & dead loyal to her misdemeanour; a Mona Lisa sitting on ten fingers to suppress hysterical laughter.

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mALL rOCOCO #2

At the counter at the Suzy Shier he sees himself involuntarily registered funhouse-like in a grid-work of mirrors for under a thin mist of his sweat he's wearing pale cover-up & he looks like a mime only ashamed & more vivid. The sales clerk implicated at the tip of his silver-drawn handgun patiently, as he empties from his motley satchel a Visa, MasterCard, both in his name demanding she ring up his odds & ends purchases like she's in a Pieta, shuddering for him. Her hand smoothing over the skirt's crinkled, crinoline pleats all the while he sips his mango milkshake smacking tongue against his mouth's crown of ridges leaving the open sliding doors vaguely dissatisfied, never knowing like the videocam, that she rang his items up anyhow at discount prices, never seeing spray from a spray bottle blending with the warm imprint of his hand as she wipes it off the countertop but marches instead with an even stride of an accomplished revolt, out the mall's entrance, a mime among city parks where children play, the most animate here in a purple-hooded sweater, wrapping her pudgy hand around the lunging chain of the tire swing where sits her dizzy but holding-on-tight brother.

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CABARET

He was born by a factory that once sold shoes to an American basketball team. The city was private, discreet, violent — you weren't. You smoked hand-rolled cigarettes & once had revealed to you in the rolled bones of dried dog shit edible magic at the step of your mother's screen door. Humiliation proved you capable in your friend's father's vintage Chevy of doing a thousand km per sec through a sea-green garage. Spider-clasp bra fastened under your fast food uniform. Sipping spiced rum dressed in your mother's clean laundry. Was taught everything you knew about life's small pleasures by clowns on the edges of themselves burning their way down. Leaving a frozen industrial forest for a chance at the famous life, where identity goes shopping. Here, where all sidewalks crack, where the rose-gray low-rises reach the crystal financial palace, here where all dreams began. The higher you get, the more crap. So went his playmates. One overcome in a personal world. Still others by cash faultline, bad sex & neglect. & his prayers all stopped talking one day. His dreams were quoted directly in the financial section. He learned to talk with a million voices to search like a million TVs. There were a million interviews outside who lacked only badge numbers & references & a crime. They needed new markets to target. Highs with no come down. You had only the moment of your wit's seductivity. & a penchant for leaping. You fulfilled an order. Declared freedom because everyone was dead in advance.

This written from the tenth floor of an office tower. Where we wait penetrated by the stare of the pizza god & order the same veggie slice every day, thank the server who returns polite with smile, sit, finish right before the twenty minute limit. Even in my dreams I am climbing. This poem will make us millions

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bOYS

Flesh crimes shine in eyes who remember. Generations cocky in an acid wash sweater swagger. Poverty stalks light running shoes always behind like a lean dog sniffing barbed wire grass.

Did the broken jaw of the angel sip your boyhood in a lukewarm bath? Teach you to pierce your cock's sparrow song through with the violent mirror of a needle? Leaving a shattered ballerina fighting silent planes & war stranded between red brick pink condo, cracked sidewalk

collect local call for privacy or for mercy until he couldn't hide his own body anymore.

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eCLIPSED:

a cITYSCAPE IN ICONS

The church warehouse is blowing with dark orange hay. Under an overturned Mac truck the guitarist, clowned hero & a fruit vendor pass the warm halo of a crack pipe.

Twin smoke rising, orbits a twinkling moon. Grasshoppers opera in thorn trees. A clergyman tups his scarlet silk scarf & strides down the bonfire streets.

Where raccoons, coiled in doorways, suck lollipop & a bigtime talent agent bends near a hedge trying to gather his wind-scattered business cards as lonely hearts shadow him in packs.

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PHARMACY pHANTASY VARIATIONS

In dreams I'm the pharmacist's favourite, he sprinkles me in sanitary waters makes videotapes of me alone for hours.

Afterhours on the tiling. I watch as he feeds me latex fingers my complexity lost to a convex mirror. In dreams I'm denuded & suck things gel candy, shining capsules

my ancestors shopping while disembodied. The night I left my body the doctors ascended to power. No one asked my opinion. But arranged my bangs on the cold floor, lubricated zones up my entire front & behind.

& me with such a pretty mind reduced to contours while I orgasm in explicit X-ray after X-ray clutching numb gloves, rubbed bum, promised only a recovery.

O city as my only witness I screwed the doctors, Let the healing winds begin.

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OMERTA

My life as a weak link. Seven world famous prophets rise against me. On a banquet table, or used roughly against a crowded family owned diner thin fabric smoothing over my angular bones. Temporary saviours in rain-dark jackets toss dirty tissue at my feet,

The Almighty passes from my body my crotch twisted in ice-pearl lingerie. My photogenic neck. My unmarked sex. If you have found me out I will lie to you. If you call me on my lie I will lie to you. I arrived in this holy script with my heart already broken, must I leave it tearing down every friction of passion of ours, too.

No. May your testicles swell to blowfish. May your night cravings sprout tentacles. May your nightlife recede to the deep green sea. You'll grow to miss me as my operatic finales sink outside your horizon. When your seven closed monologues start folding towards a bare pain of their own, my friends. Water rinsing over the culvert. Damp rats dancing among the weeds. No menu, no piano bar, no one to point out those gorgeous distortions between split frames of thought. Long nights you'll be spending rock-bottom again without me.

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STRIP pOWER tEASE Bring Down the Clown. — anonymous poster

You tear away my secret life my flitting thoughts, my shy half-uncovered fate. I'll take off my shirt.

You treat me like your pretty little toy. You had too many pretty things & wanted to smash them.

Yet I linger on these sketches, lovingly. Pay nice attentions to a cloudy spot just under a left nipple. Strike, justify, strike. This is our world, my friend

our acts concealed within our actions. Locked words, hardened looks a metaphor of command. An evil king watches us from the cupboards & I don't like the feel of your hands.

& these words are not lovers, They're not even enemies.

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OVEREXPOSURE

They have the soft abused eyes of their baby photos tattooed like stiffened vineyards on their necks. Tough rumpled leather or feathery creased bandanna dressed for war, on a sunny day in front of buildings, furious, melodramatic, in love too hard cupping hands to a watery limpid butterfly on public land riding the bathtub of a hot pedophiliac touch into the mink bra of a sun cancelling their existence. Nothing can touch them. God is a caustic that sets you in relief. Life is a vaulted blushing ceiling that can burn a hole in you. A void can be big, red, sticky & warm. You can break down, perish in glitter & still find your body spread like Iranian caviar against a cop car. They had lived too much, but they have let it crawl all over their skins before. No overdose can take what's already damaged. No prophet can renounce what's capable of being taken. Any circle of warmth can be fallen through. All stripped down they were weeds that would last against all odds & for nothing. Too beautiful elegies to burst in alien meanings for a ravishing cruise through afternoons. These are the merciless to traffic bright pleasures for a surplus that's predatory & craving. They are the dignified to suck jewelled cock of princeling & never brag. Can travel the world & never leave a strip club circuit. They are too proud to beg. & I am not a dance club, I cannot save everyone. But I think of them, the unpardonable brats, the demoniacal, the poisoned ones, as the clock on the Manulife Centre ignites in red life like a leaky forehead. & I would be happy for the party if the circle should widen into velvet pillows into the streets & sometimes like an involuntary heartbreaker the summer almost calls to them sometimes a sort of homecoming almost comes.

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WHEN HEAVEN SHALL sHINE dOWN aLSO oN gENTLE tRASH 1IKE mE "0 my lord, I can't wait to meecha." — Macy Gray

After I died, I got sexy in my afterlife. You see it sleepwalking through a cloud castle of superior killers holding it all together like getting a tube of sparkle jelly squeezed in your eye like a cockroach has just skirted over the delicate wound of a peach in a corner of a chamber of gently rocking brass posts while cherubs gossip all around you want me. There are days they crash their own parties like broken starlets. Days a great storm of blank masculine hands rise up for cruel humming little cherub bodies who'll float up like lily pads & all is heaven cum cum cum. But now they give thanks for their new scandals & shambles over an old city of wreckage. As a woman on a streetcar said for a language more entangled than born-again business districts pulsing to a latin fever of pentagons. I'll say it anyway. Praise Jesus. My baroque cosmic gangsters return, one after one, curled lacquer fingernails out in jewellery. We spend all night in hot pink Jacuzzis, flirt full mouth & never need to eat. Men in business suspenders strip to their boxers & do us a chorus: 0 terrible world of interiors please give us back the streets 0 freeze us in an eternal paralyzed dream of them of nights alone, less than broke, in or out of beds our dream-time systems are not worth a mattress more over everyone else that's dead. All fall down, for their politics & their pettiness. All fall down, for their language & their jagged creepy ideal. No one discovers injustice for the first time. Carefully, quietly. Leave behind all you need to keep. Heaven come down. We're in it deep. So I lay myself bare before the aggressors & contenders. Our intricate warfare of disavowal, doomed love, oblivion & the wish, So far clear cruising. Come & get me.

1 look good.

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4.

aMBIENT dISPERSIONS

"I can't swim anywhere without someone always swimming under me." - S.R.S.

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b&ROQUE SEQUENCE:

aN eVENT iH zEAL tIME

& we were fearless that day, being far from the sick people who loved us up the pink-gray marble staircase my one hand tracing the railing as it turned a final spiral

top floor, museum of civilization

you holding my other hand, bounding ahead a cafeteria there maze of receding glass panels soft lighting on the steam of stir-fries & a waiter led us through a system of low brick dividers a network of thin tube sprinklers raining mist on the broadleafed tropical plants ghost faces turning to us turning from their lunches their conversations spoken like a tidy portfolio turning to us us so quiet our waiter seating us the only people on that side where we took off our coats boots, wet socks, sweaters, undershirt, bras body adornments, watches & our waiter brought us menus. I ordered the vegetarian sandwich on whole wheat bread. You wanted soup with yours.

You set your chin a moment against your collarbone let your eyes close flipped your fingers absently in your drinking glass magnifying them & a few flecks of skin settled to bottom as you brought your fingers up to your bangs as our waiter left us, looking overworked & nervous as you tried to align a matted clump in your bangs asking me if I'd liked the exhibits. I said I thought they were OK. You thought that the security guard on the stool near the Jackson Pollocks was cute, all boredom, no muscle. I thought about it. Heard your hair tear & saw you wince.

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I thought some more. I agreed.

The waiter placed a porcelain plate near your hands steam of peppery leek soup 4 a bronze tray in front of me, our two sandwiches made beautifully in layers of spinach, crumbled feta, black olives salted lightly, splashed with oil, on thick crusty bread & garnished with a careful lettuce garden home to so many white butterflies their motionless wings raised together & clipped through with staples you stared at your plate, just sick & I tugged at a staple desperate, a little terrified as you ripped out staples in reckless double time & I ripped one's wings & he struggled on the plate struggled in circles others drifted tranquilly to the skylight. & a few fluttered to your back furry prickly legs over a scab of yours & you screamed & as you stood, exposing bright wet sores among snickers & gasps from the other section I rushed to brush them off, but butterflies began covering me both of us brushing our hands wildly over the twisted leprous flesh up our backs, chests & necks the waiter rushing over, just mortified holding up two sprigs of fig leaves picked from a fig tree near the kitchen him rushing over, his lapel crawling with them motioning to us, like I said, mortified. Slapping a butterfly on his lapel, it fell. Motioning sternly to us, madam, sir, if you wouldn't mind — waving the sprigs, madam, sir, if you wouldn't mind repeating it like that.

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nIGHT hOLOGRAMS COLLAGE

Yellow cards litter the infinite regress of brown tiles. Trading done for the day. Ghost traces of numbers manifest as black letters in the TSE index. Eyes, glass like channels into a mask raised in the swarming aggression; baby-faced animation watching from a 40 inch LCD monitor. Oo-oo-oo what a little moonlight'11 do. Feel his warm grasp walking the sidewalk dodging the billboard gesture of gangs. Feel daddy. It's like it's OK. The hostages will be OK now that Bruce Willis has been stripped of his undershirt. Oo-oo-oo the moon, heavy. Purple night, a window out a cozy condo bedroom. Peach duvet, fireman teddy shelves of paperbacks. The bright green salamander lives in an aquarium.

The naked moon sits on a wet autumn balcony in a lawn chair.

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PANORAMIC nOSTALGIA fOR tECHNOLOGY

Rising clouds of glowing gas erupt outside a pane of glass. Sister practices the grand piano in the drawing room. Her force of buckle shoes press pedals to the rug deliberate, very quick an aria of opera; father smokes a bong, reads the stocks. Lifeforms in NASA uniforms transplant brother, from under a hanging spider plant, seed him in an oblong tube. Sister pauses after a third movement; looks up to the maid stalking down stairs. (She's pointing a raygun, wearing a headset.) Brother bubbles under amniotic fluid. Mother's on the cellular seals the titanium hatch to the cellar whispering sweet erotic nothings to a conference of armed women scientists in the mountains.

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fESTIVAL nIGHT hYMN

The night falls like fingers first fall shuddering the body to a first life — a life unlike any — a religious brownout — confusion of tequila for hot coffee a white-blue moan

. . . blossoms alarm systems over gated communities . . . Electric tension on a Bible page. Straining to see your own naked in the mirror above the drawer.

(Put on your mask & feathers the empty window sings)

There'll be a fire to your jealousy a narcotic lurch to your kiss the blood of the earth to laugh in the memory of every supermarket potato.

(Kiss me, says the window flipping a curtain)

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URBAN rOCOCO

The snow came down as blue slush on quiet ground. & the rains fell hard, unsettling car alarms into an urgent transpersonal revelry up side streets over blocks of the dimmed nighttime city centre. & the rains ran heavy, flushed street curbs enfolded down iron storm drains interspersed & crystal-splashed with oil funnelling, funnelled downwards into a rainbow ice water whirlpool. & laughing with his mouthful of Skittles Jack Sissy, Chicken Little of his workplace at the laundromat the one to say, "We'll be shut down by next month" when the month already neared an end burst bellyfuls of lemon, blue, red laughter. Today, the first of November. The air conditioning tasted of plush towels in steaming dryers. Juliet leant forward on the counter telling Jack a joke, dark pupils flitting from gold cigarette pack to blue pack to pack of Dentyne gum. Juliet rattled off the punchline, & Jack snorted, thinking he'd just die, thinking seriously he would die. But you don't die in a laundromat. You just work there. Jack lunged fingers through his crop of curly hair bit down on his bottom lip. Juliet was as kind to him as anyone. He had watched her fold sweaters, aching to help, to touch wool. But as Juliet now offered him her hand he took the money, gave her quarters in exchange. She went away, gave a smile, & on the TV above the dryers watched the Simpsons & was home by nine.

Jack was at the public library by ten reading over the same sentence in his novel again that began with a word & ended with a word & the word was with him only sleepy & unclear. Jack took a breath to concentrate, looked up. His glasses grew profuse with light as morning broadened over the skylight of the library.

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Juliet edged the rink. The two stood by a tree, hand to hand, tweed jacket to jean jacket. All summer contained in lovely white beneath them. They glided, glided, Jack touching her shoulder, falling his head & novel falling in a crack in the desk at the library. OK.

He needed coffee.

The sun seemed to descend that morning from a region of purer air on Juliet in an alleyway. Frost sang down the handrail of the fire escape. A delivery van backed up, beeping, exhaust billowing in a single sheet through the fire escape. Juliet, pressing tight to brick, let the delivery van back up past her & as she fled the alleyway blue light splashed across her sunglasses.

Jack sipped his coffee the frost steaming out of it watching construction a block from the library. Bags of cement, crater in earth, dusty orange-vested men. Walking away, the reddened sun, the jackhammer just pounding in him.

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STILL 1IFE, WITH aTMOSPHERIC fEEDBACK

1. Since the photocopier broke my dreams don't work. Pigeons cling to a sky-like barrier of a sky. The hobgoblin cowers among dirty stacks of multicolour paper. He can do the police in twelve voices. It's funny, it shouldn't be. See the texture of divisions grow.

Orange, blue, orange, orange, blue.

I am here, said the photocopier.

2. An emptiness of plenty. A delivery of armoured trucks weeps for the smokestacks. The smokestacks kneel for the factories. The factories cosy up to a power grid. The power grid drinks up the sky. There's no more sky.

So I've sent you this reproduction S.A.S.E. 3, Scarlet fingers of the moon. A thousand-eared flirt clips through a lubricant night. The colours of vacant windows teem on every side.

I dance among a troop of benevolent machinery. Fictional tank tops dampen across with a fluid alphabet. Come now, my photocopier, become a speaking instrument.

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SENTIMENTAL pORNOGRAPHIES OF tHE fAMILY

Little boy cries daddy, mommy, my red dress doesn't fit. I grow a detachable cock that I let walk like a dog. I wear pigtails like a little girl. Band-Aids on my knees that I am proud of.

An empty couch.

Little boy cries daddy, mommy, wash me like a dollar bill. They take all kinds of precaution with dollar bills. Do you know? Lemon suds, deodorant. Who are you?

You are a stranger & I was born of animals.

I am the prettiest fireman bow wow wow. An empty couch.

My naval is ravenous & can drink up the neighbourhood. An empty couch.

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INFINITE mATTO SATURATION pROOECT 1. He tore open his holy denim T-shirt & was immediately fired upon by cherry pies.

0 my sweet one, don't go. 2. 0 blessed sweet one/ who holds boy cunt in fields of blue corn flowers with smokestacks. 3. The perforations of your flesh are my tastebuds, my saliva, my hot & sweet chili sauce. I've sewn you up like a turkey, all pretty. 4. Wicked butterball wrapped in red cellophane floating in a water percolator.

Nasty saviour, playing hard to get. Big bad dead thing, unhappy me. 5. You're the sun & I'm oversensitive.

You're the moon & never call me.

6. 1 don't know whether passion or circumstance but it's sexy the attention of men who don't want me. Toss me around like in third place or second best. Are you a jealous god? 7. I want love through paper thin walls

you fucking divine predator heaven cum cum cum cum.

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tHE aNGEL gABRIEL WRESTLES tHE mARQUIS dE sADE

In the touchless machinery of his stiffened liquid imaginings Marquis de Sade, the patron saint of cruelty, yearns upwards emitting a jagged creeping serenade & sips scentless cocktails lonely for the bright afternoons of contact. Thinking machines classify anything. Umbrellas cool him. He coughs in an area of water with no body. Gives coy half-looks through watery edges of deep-set eyes. Smirks. A cloud passes over a blank spot outside the bars. He stirs on his throne straddled by involuntary orgasms pampered by a nursery of technicians with forgotten hands. His memory clings to situation like a dance beat. But not the music nor the money is our master bow as low as we may. Groves of stripped timber lie crouched awaiting vanished animals, in mass whispers. Maniac nymphs caress on what little of the dance floor is left. Disappointed kittens will lick up the little left over pools of love. Cool mechanical sugar daddies always disavow the hot fatherly love of terrorists. We're at war with ourselves 4 losing. Broken neck of cables. A soft tender belly swings its sloped shoulders wide against a hole in the lingering haze. The angel wants to go too even though Marquis can see no islands through the disaster of his progress palaces screaming & can no longer lie in the raw starlight with the image of too much war pressed up against his lips. There is passion, there is also circumstance. His angling and edged love goes to sleep in the dirty comforting winds of the monsters. His tacky architecture falls down each night with the whizzing pedestrians bothering the sleepless homeless. His prisoners don't visit him. Metal lice skirt across the iron floor enchanted not even by demons. Lifelike pins weaving the tapestries of cruelty.

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tHB CASTLE oF pONY "I feel like a castle just dropped on me & I just kept on walking." — one of the voices

My gangsters dance like ballerinas in the rose-black courtyard. They are our protectors, our vengeance, their ties done up straight & tough. Tomato vines twine around sculptural variations on a mass of extinct gods. The animals won't stop looking at us without moving their mouths. We are long, shirtless, luminous, shifting. We walk upright along garden paths with the dignity of lizards. Where pure-blood saints in rabbit suits surround & beat up unmoved mannequins. When cows & oxen burn in a technology of ominous fields. Sleek-design coffins speed along the western hemisphere & all good robots are exiled from the pumpkin field. That the earth should scream for a thousand years seems only appropriate & natural. Events build on themselves but no doors open. Things escalate. Then we come in here like secret morning messengers shrinking through the bone structure of a face with bruised eyes. There are velvet pillows in the upper chambers. You visit my library by spaceship. I keep walking through your dreams unconscious & unharmed. My dreams keep appearing between the slits of digital bits in major motion pictures. You keep directing movies with the sheer force of your face concentrating at breakfast. The chalices are always overflowing with orange juice & burnt toast. Our liquid art lights the windows. I am haunted by presentiments. You are equipped with a disk drive weaving memories of flesh from the heart of three dead children in a forgotten basement. The towers surround us. I stand at a grand piano tuned from entrails of my violences. The royal attendants suddenly like me. Although my feet are dirty one more time, this time for real, I am learning how to sing.

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SCENE OF tHE pERFECT CRIME rEVISITED tHROUGH SHATTERED gLASS

it's not you Sam it's me see I've learned to stay down after the knock-down punch this time see the cool orange birth of coral reef this is rock-bottom Sam & these angelfish brushing in silver flashes against my mouth school of sardines up the leg of my swimming trunk slip slop slimy soap bubbles precious plip plop pink bubbles listen Sam listen look at me Sam I'm coming out this time I'm coming up like I'm a trunk of broad green leaves reaching high under the tropical sun like I'm branches full of rainbow chirping monkeys boy monkeys eating the ticks off of boy monkeys' ears girl monkeys peeing into the warm air I won't wait any longer for the global house of cards to perfect itself I've waited until they were all fallen & face up & it wasn't aces Sam it came up daisies & blue rock cliffs & the opening was ripe for cranberries & not live wire I'm calling the con here eating the cheeseburger straight out of the trash can & calling you fussy it's stupid to review the evidence of course we're guilty cuz the shattering sex was also the saddest la la eyes closed me thinking not so fast didn't mean to such & such memories things can never be the same kisses kisses crisis nice nice it's OK though Sam I'm already famous shh shh police agency in the head - hush Sam - shhh I'm calling the con here don't try to trick me into thinking this is all very cool I can see the bull's eye painted on my chest you gain intimate knowledge of your ass if there's a kick me sign on it Bob Dylan it's like this he said a bank a song a song a bank who who who he thinks who I gotta survive Dylan's locked in a safety deposit box Sam - a song without context yet trying to survive — give me a book of theory & a Ouija board & I'm off to save Dylan Sam I'm off to bring down the government I'm tired of messing up my own life Sam I'm off to mess up someone else's

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pARABLE OF aN eGG

Imagine the hardened egg of this world upon the shore of all boundaries dissolving. The wide field of people resuming at the turnstile. Bowing with the pressure, secured back into space, moving to keep moving, moving not to forget, forgetting not to be forgotten, moving towards the carton, moving against the carton, moving, move, move — MOVE. Individual but only as fetuses in eggs. Now forget that world. Four shell walls, white-silver, designed by no one you know. Leave, silent among the passengers. Monitor the wall moving always just ahead of you. Once imitations of your face reached my face through the mass of emergencies, time was short, there was little tenderness left between escalators & when I awoke years later, outlined in strange bedrooms, I was outmaneuvered like in a dream. Three shell walls, stream of hot water, one shower curtain, none of this shelter. You begin at an alleyway. No better, an egg. Yell at the shell wall, the shell wall echoes — o really. Kick at the shell wall, the shell wall rises twelve stories. Be conscious of resuming a story. The agitated eyes, the gestures closing on themselves, arm against belly, belly against belly, belly against navel, navel against forehead, no gaps, no cracks, no windows. Who live alone in the threat of one another, startled, tantalized by just how many bodies will project past this street curb without ever colliding. Who live crushed in awe of a heaven so premised on forgetting that when forgetting is no longer an option it declares open war. The closed circuits. The pop up terrors. The money changing moneyed hands. Hurled as you are, no clear sky above, no hard soil below, four walls, no rehearsal, no evasions, you begin digging. Assume you are digging towards a million buried persons. Assume a million buried persons are digging towards you. 0 city, city we are laughter among strangers. Figments among a billion dreaming minds. Look up. The unbreathed air of the tunnel carries voices. Look around. We are among ourselves.

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h¥MN tO pLACE (tHUNDER bAY) "Help me God, I'm frightened of myself." — Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

here their eyes held to water salt-gray necks & chatter-squawking here the seagulls scatter in faint repetition like overexposures of themselves the moon's shadow falling on the pull of black waters the pull of black waters breaking white on rockshores on the rockshores with black spruce overlooking a sweater-hooded boy follows a shining bicycle path eyes held to water eyes & smart-ass conviction he touches the water he lights a cigarette were the moonlight in origin like a blind spot on a set of prints something that passes unfocused beneath like an after-image of the past emerging from lakeshore mists like a revolution of relief skipping stones over subsidized homes some state of grace approaching ground were one to state a place joy of rivers & of lakes of under the railway bridge leather hearts & lust could one invoke a name & all the seagulls lifted up from every postcard rack to rise over river-bowl, rusted tributary reanimate, magic, flown from garbage, this harbour, my home he touches the water an ash touches the water

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& whatever is not sparked in the dark of closed shops in glasses of a lone figure as a steam of headlights floods by & what has no breadth or breath choked between warehouses, receding following road sign & road sign of violent unremembering names for what ceases to be imagined in bingo parlours thick with nicotine & the promise of good luck on a welfare cheque on late night buses, defeated, drunk already, dry beyond belief, beyond hope getting beyond hope the worn gold of morning blinking age-lines on eyelids early mornings in truck stops brushing teeth in public sinks, in rusted dirty mirrors tricked by soul-hardening phantoms back to a flurry of memories leaving on Greyhound buses the pale gold of midmorning rain shower settling down into an iron-coloured mist clouds, bone-white, moving on industrial ribs the sun like an aperture cracked across by parting wings stretched through the sidelong smoke, an opening & the gold spreading full from beneath the surface of the water & he touches water S the water reciprocates the touch

the water reciprocates the touch

o, the water

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1ATEST SCULPTURES — for Margaux Williamson

I am watching you knead & touch your own living clay-smudged fingers into a stoic clay head, fallen cheeks a hard mouth that rises to pout back at you although you had wanted to let this one laugh a bit I worry about this space as often as I'm thrilled by it, here where our intentions keep collapsing on themselves, on us, over & over. Like love you never seem to get it right while still in love. I'm talking about your sculptures here but am watching your hands

Or how

pinch them. Lay wet skin on skin. I wanted to keep these things separate, I was scared to be this in the open, when anything's everything. Art & life. Maybe I'll press it all together this time red-swollen eyes, thumb-pressed noses, how I'm watching your serious face as you sculpt them afraid for this moment that you are more than me. My voice seeming small and tugging — come for a beer? Layer on layer responds to your fingers, beautiful, although I know you're up against it, that every wrinkle betrays, hurts. There's shit you take for being honest to your desire, straight up to those too caught up by you here in this hardened face, maybe. For being ambitious intimidating & a woman, maybe. For each bump or scar I suspect some fucker tried to shut you down it's like how you say "art" with both belief and hatred, like we talk "art" in theoretically reckless terms while getting drunk and drunker, ripping seams open on everything. This is your space the space you taught me. Here I'm a little more than me a little in love with you no "because" just children in a collapsed house, cinders in a firepit, the wind everywhere

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You go in a month to Scotland & then it's us in the open with only little revolts to protect us against a perfect world. There's a bunch of shit here that's impossible to say, I just hope you know what I mean. In case of backlash I break off my middle fingers to give you. Keep being impossible & immense & loud, laughing with art at our petty tragedies. In case of victory we'll see each other in the clear resuming our one conversation that only ends with us furiously nodding — yes. Just keep laughing, keep laughing, keep laughing, though I like to think people can also hear you laughing furiously now under the eyes of little me. Your biggest fan, R.M.K.

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PERCY'S fLIGHT

1. It was a drizzle of mist on October 17th. A twig that tipped from our shiny wet trunk allowed the sky to huddle upon its shivering leaf as a footpath foraged through the underbrush of months.

& branches, like pinstripe court jesters, as the wind returned through a chain-link portal bowed low to the lawn. On the kitchen wall a calendar trailed off into yellow squares. It was too chilly out for playing; my shadow clutched herself free of roe. & Percy, my older brother, who measured the length of his years in a ray of pale heat whose listless boy-arms were flung variously, variously strained or twisted over the dry hardwood floor — suddenly raised his chin, excited, as if (me saying, what's out there Percy, there on the lawn?) as if hearing his own voice whisper at our bay window. & I'd run with my palms to the sill but saw only a bearded big kid with full green eyes. Idling he watched from the passenger side of a Volkswagen van, his hand gesturing coldly to the kerchiefed driver in denim. Percy didn't grant these two a glance. Didn't read those siren-red slogans gaffitied on our apartment block, or the van slowing in its tracks. & grabbing my hand — his was very warm — he sang, come out Alley-the-Alley-Cat, come out on the lawn, I'll show you what I know how to do. So, us slipping through the brown foyer me barely with my mittens on, he pulled me, holding my hand very tightly. Where the security door closed there he let go of me. Later I'd miss the warm fold of his hand. 4 with teasing eyes, his hair as wind-teased as the loose gray branches on our tree, he looked at once all solemn I thought he was just playing, tongue out to the breeze.

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2. You could almost feel the clock shift. A newspaper tumbling across our lawns, street & gardens. Minutes switching to the hour, standing at attention on top of the black blossom of the clock hand.

& Percy was smiling young & wild roses, he was smiling wooden swing sets, when his teeth suddenly shrivelled, & his lips puckered tight, like he was whistling to himself — & I was entranced by a moist noise, peeling from behind his back, his arms crossed there. I was enchanted by his eyes, teasing, although so beautifully black & silver. I tried to shout for Mommy but could only whisper — my tongue had gone soft as the lawn. & Mom heard only sirens on TV. Meanwhile Percy's ski-jacket sleeve had become soft & fresh air. & new & newer limbs now sprouting on him like twigs on our tree in spring, only so much quicker. & he was so beautiful. I was entranced by a moist noise. The sound of exactly twin newborns emerging his back unhusking neatly in pairs of two, four so beautiful clear wings as glassy, cloudy, true as newborn eyes open foreign to a delivery room. Four so beautiful wings, uplifting & falling, falling & uplifting high above his scalp & his spiny hair & meanwhile I'd been rushing a tiny prayer to the Lord of Everything, including the magnificent dragonfly, but my prayer was stopped by an even smaller sigh as Percy let fall his wings & lifted to the sky.

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3. White clouds repeated on blue sky. Child Find placards repeated on bus shelters. Faces of Percy repeated like a line in a skipping song. The weather

has changed, snowdrift on dry pavement. Now Alice, you saw who kidnapped your brother, nurse says. My quiet smile. Percy's spearmint smile, black & white photo, a picture of the disappeared. Hospital window. Police, caps off, in our brown foyer. Percy's photo magnified a hundred-fold in this housefly's eye, long-legged on the clean ward sheets, whispering of the disappeared. Percy's smile on a passing bus. White sun s baking soda clouds. This housefly's sheer wings. Snowdrift on kids' tongues. Percy's red mittens frozen to a snow bank. Hospital window, this housefly. My breath collected as kids' laughter passes the bus shelter, suburbs, the laughing Earth-sky.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Versions of these poems have appeared in a variety of on-line and print sources including Ultraviolet magazine, The Third Place, Subterranean, Kiss Machine, Tupperware Sandpiper, Public, Bi Words, Zygote, Kaleidoscope, The Literary Review of Canada and the ezines Intell-X and Zatta Fact. "pRELUDE" was originally a text installation at the Onion Gallery in Kingston, Ontario for a collaboration with painters Sherwin Tjia and Margaux Williamson: Cheshire Girls & Their Women. Both "cASTLE oF pONY" and "hEAVEN'S 10W hORIZON" are derived from larger collaborative text/visual projects of the same name with Margaux Williamson. I would like to thank Paul Vermeersch for weathering this strange monster of a project with me in his conscientious suggestions as editor, his professionalism where I faltered, and Insomniac Press for continuing to covet the decidedly out there. Also Margaux Williamson and Sherwin Tjia for the cover art and the design. There are no two people I trust more, and I am a lucky little mosey to have people so close to me bring their formidable talents to bear upon my work. I want to gush for a moment in regards to the help, ongoing support, emotional, artistic and financial, and the wisdom of experience given by Carolyn Smart. She was far more than an instructor to me in her advocating and mentorship and advice, and frankly, she was one of the few reasons I continued writing. Thank you far beyond my capacities to thank and this first book would never have appeared without you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I want to thank my family for their support and always giving my madnesses the benefit of the doubt. It's taken a little more than a suspension of disbelief to pull this off and I could not have done it without you. Again I must thank my angels Sherwin Tjia and Margaux Williamson for the years of collaboration, the personal and artistic support, and for stepping off this earth a little to dream with me. If there is anything otherworldly woven in between these threads it is because of the two of you. There are so many friends and chance encounters who helped along the way that I feel selfish not mentioning them all, but I must limit it here to the kids at the runaway school bus, my baroque cosmic gangsters here in Toronto, Art at the Union, and the household of 37 Jones. The Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy for the hard work they do through often thankless and absurd circumstances to keep literacy work thriving in Toronto. Melissa Kluger who envisioned the first medium where poetry began to act like poetry to me, Ultraviolet, Her creation will be an indefinite influence. And, as always, the angels. You keep a low profile but you're crazy and exact. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank a culture of global capitalist expansion that intersected decidedly with our fates over this last decade, pushing me well beyond my intellectual, bodily and creative limits in finding anything at all of interest to say about it, I thank you humbly for taking the time to sit down with me despite an absurdly stormy schedule and allowing me to trace your more sensitive contours. I hope you will find this portrait of you at least apropos.

rYAN kAMSTRA is a lost last poet & baroque lyrical robot from a growing hope party in outer space. aLL fALL dOWN, his first indie album, was released in 2001. info on projects: allfalldown.freewebsites.com