i’d like to be one who wends to where the interests are.
make me a desirer. put that into my self-portrait’s
conspiratorial eye. i aspire to be slower
than teleology has time for, than any curse can
happen. here we are. the sun’s taken the rose for a ride:
party to van drive ‘cross life: apples core, vital shale-pours.
the oceanic countryside’s like nationalist paint
i recognized, rejected — remembering my school french-folds —
as fallow power flows through the shoulder. “where we going?”
the con-pro from the party earlier turns to answer,
“if slow town’s supposed to lie in relations, its cousins
sort of form a lineup, point out one way’s for another”
how else’d we understand that between joyous leisure time
opposite familiar slow oblivionation
maybe there could still be a topology of options
but with travel? to see with eyes unclouded by hatred.
“we all will be movers for work; yours is to lineate
the rhythm in the open atmosphere-moment-volume-
calm-complex-generous-catastrophe-etcetera!”
that’s the point the van crashes. the horizon terminates.
————————
a broken-open body, our con pro’s long vehicle’s
foreshortened, accordioned. the unmoved backdrop’s full force-
’s quashed, truly, the moment we thought we were having over
whatever prior geist or world-order we were against.
from eastward from the city, westward, we’re slouching back home-
wards, our bedrooms, to sleep into separate apartments.
put the curtains up and soft lights, just make the most
of the day’s diffusion, the minutia, rain-stained grey concrete.
where over that-a-way the sun blazes behind buildings,
here, the moon rests in the shared parking lot; it’s just that still.
“life finds a way,” i guess. “a virus is like life.” i bring
everything to the table, make tables on the table.
if success is supposed to be just continuity,
“why wouldn’t you want to be successful?” i ask myself
where if i didn’t have to go but couldn’t stay, would i
still want to be? the small feed of myself i see has been
lagging, making a point and another one, shattering,
making in between an imaginary momentum.
there’s got to be something more than just this. the banging starts.
all the world around this part reveals its hardness. it’s here.
————————
then, “i think the perfect birthday party feels immortal
to me. it does a double cleave. it’s a synecdoche
of the whole year in an evening and it evens out the year,
you know (?), lets what is knowledge-able in it take the wheel
and peel out of there. just look at that horizon. expect
good things for the birthday person, pet, or propinquiter.”
propinquitry is the word which i’ve found myself, using
a kind kind of sequencing, kind of like the day after
the birthday and all of the pleasure that exists in that.
you would need a curved whole-world sized t-square to measure that.
“it’s a celebration for you to continue being
yourself, you divide then recognize yourself wider than
when you began, for a moment more than what’s after
all that marvels and disasters on feet, in parts, of clay.
it’s like all of the toasts in toronto have come your way.
that’s what the perfect birthday party feels like anyway.”
in all seriousness, i heard a person saying this.
my contemporaries would all gather and talk like it
truly just was what seemed like destiny to do. we went
every possible way to make slow town seem possible.
————————
slow town, what it’s not, “i won’t let it just be ossified
nostalgia porn: ruins and cabins with helmut newtons
on aeon-patina’d teak walls beneath the infinite
ceiling mirrors my immediate imagination
cooks up, handsome dimensionless kitchens, storage for days,
and a whole life reacting to the air.” there would be more.
“nor would the library only loan s. r. delany’s
dhalgren, r. gladman’s ravickians, any benjamin,
the weather (l. robertson), de rerum natura in
english, jerusalem of emanating albion,
ulysses (the first quarter), life: a users manual…”
definitely more than k. solie or i. calvino.
were it only a way of being in time together,
a fast-held new-deal slow. “but in which i keep my own hours.
maybe i’ll feel some decelerating parameters
but it may be just the gravity of living out life.”
“woke mid-winter in a de chirico. not this either.”
“woke up eight-thousand years ago in lascaux, in between
the bull and illumination and it was not like this.”
“as the very least leads me to guess, so slow town’s got it.”
————————
the con-pro’s texting voice has relaxed, makes contact with mine.
like, these short lines sent lace the aether contiguously.
for summer, all salutations wave thick in rainwater
drops, interrupting thunderclaps. all, sun-dried up and out
by arrival, “and what an adventure it has all been.”
“even we’re some lesson learned.” “the forest’s the leaves turning
in fog-machine mists” “how we get the epic and the still,”
“and we’ve got the contemporary,” “more, we get connect-
ion going towards one another towards another.”
“and where this is enough to observe” “that’s slow town, baby!”
i think the con-pro is an exciting kind of person;
reads like a big fat yes! quixotic, yet affectionate.
always attentive to the counter-tempo, allegro
pitter-patters of absolute collapse: “the azimuth’s
different from where you are and the sense you can hear nearing
what’s got to be a consequence of life.” “whose life?” “who’s life
indeed? if i’d written it in greek, you wouldn’t ask me.”
i’ve been needing to remember this has happened before
and never quite like this; this cut the dialectic did
to make a friendship in krisis, do we keep going in?
————————
“a descent up from petri-stuff –– sea’s an agar plate-
medium analogue –– a craft of world-like bodies by
generation. venture to gloss, when’s the agency in
this viscous spread? then! what happened, without a doubt,’s like debt:
holes for the hyphae, a soft beach for the amphibious,
a first recognition — a generous erotics of
novel compliments. friends collect at common accidents.
who’s waiting for us to wash up as well? well? well well well…
if i see you, star, on the other side of the wide gyre,
i suppose that i could see how you’d also end up here,
it’s how i’ll learn to de-centre the individual,
think drawing an imperfect circle, it’ll be the wrist
how we get the fleet immediate with deep historic
texture: bumps, burrs, dramatic changes in the temperature
turning corners in a spiral. we surface in unknown
water, like, from flat, we grew out of it; we carry it.
how we make without it (some good decisions and some bad
embrained), shapes and takes life: can be a lost hard-dust decade,
maybe heavy waves, an angel –– just as arbitrary,
what selects exigent habits.” next, we enter wreckage.
————————
midst this wild life-of-the-mind i let myself find my feet
heeding every caution, reaching out and being discreet
simultaneously, spending my late summer watching
rain melt into the many undiscovered bridge rivers
‘round midtown toronto, very thoroughly green tunnels,
very populous parks, subtle bubbles pulse and repulse
a shimmering of resemblances, little etiquettes
run little circuits, imply what’s just before forever
(assuming a world will without your rapturous applause)
pauses where judgement’s most clear, like, cleaved to the scenery
like the lichen, like forking vines, like slime, like dopamine
casts a spell on the walked forest bath i’ve kept attention
all this time to, the sediment: broken slabs of cement
tent, keep the potential and haunt in open air under
the twin pinch ton of speculation and nimbyism.
my heart expands. ruins run up that hill to the gardens,
builds an illusion of tension if you’re not used to it,
but i can afford to be precarious and relaxed
knowing this erosion and, on a fun scale, entropy,
and guessing where if there is a thrown down stone it could fall.
————————
but what if it’s all growth, thus vital? coming from the wood-
work’s the verse that binds this short life to time, climate, krisis
when you predicted but least expected it just like this:
the eery the english can’t shut-up about. so confused
again. shores crash, intracontinental. o, toronto,
the con-pro and i’ve, together, re-arrived to return.
we’ve learned from our separate sojourns. the lo-fi homework drones
we shared to keep up an aesthetic of slow in common
resounded only so-so. still worth the experience,
and anyway we’re here, and anyway we can go back,
we will. “that’s that salmon sense against body’s origin”
“i’m compelled to answer when i ask myself a question.”
our project, first to figure out a slow town in a year,
was our energetic centre, that flickering over
where we keep on going slow enough to get out of here.
i get to meet the contemporary propinquiter
without much to say we’ve achieved; still, the epic demands
a symmetry happens, and the c.p. seems familiar
to me. think infinite divisibility. think dreams
of a shear cliff getting shearer and shearer in our trance.
————————
still, being beholden to biographical writing,
“what’s doing? what’s going? what’s having one over? what’s whole?”
— ding! — the whistle tolls. time’s evening so much it disappears
into the mystery of our grassy conversation.
“hasn’t it been a real journey to get to this section?
where’d all this ecology come from?” cold people get gone,
stretching off the grey-made park-scape, they speckle — dissipate —
“why wait?” late september, already nearly my birthday,
seems like fate. an eleventh wave undertaking, “you sleep?”
maybe a map over a mirror or a möbius
would describe best where ambitions, separated, could put us
together. the c.p.’s answers curl around my questions
and make them happen again. against these ending seconds,
every atomized white lie has that apocalyptic
inner. behind the hill above the river, the long row’s
bedroom brass lights imply silhouettes of activity;
their privacy and my negative capability
cast shadows of their immediate futures, though the past,
all that seep, it’s completely inaccessible to me
without reach, without invitation, “where’s the compulsion?”
————————
some need the eye-to-eye. my terminator drive, seated
in its own, personal, feed-lyric mode — no decisions —
for instance, slows every recognition down to the fold.
is this the one loose thread from irreparability?
who goes the wood-wound path that’s next to the major roadway?
so many people don’t know me either. we’re floating heads
together in the rain. yellow-red watercolours. wet
grey paper today reads another terrible number.
the very idea. the very idea. very
much the way it is here, but there it is america.
there are individuals, and the individuals,
they don’t fuck around, no, only purposively forward.
was it what was said? when had i forgotten? the shower?
the swerve? it usually will occur to me — a feverous
shame, care –– somewhere. maybe being in-between things was where
i got my verve from direction, i could not be contained.
looking for work, i’m practicing a newer signature.
great! age will then blur it together as new characters
come. they’ll emerge and re-immerse after changing the trace,
and so this will not be the same place i remain with you.
————————
many a torontonian’s interiority
has manifested elsewise, ethically or not at all,
so who’s hindsight to list the worst until the next year doubles?
the newier of us wouldn’t know the olds’ unheimlich
cold downtown, the belief they’ll keep building. midtown won’t stop
still. fruit rots on a long vine, the vindictive mayor gives
neither techné nor charisma as actively nothing.
it’s thin-ice, this kairos; you’d wonder why they wouldn’t fall
over themselves to do the right thing. fear or a passion,
that classic lattice i use when the sky and ground come loose:
and your perspective blooms, silky kind of thing to keep close
at hand. whole spots –– totally transparent, a blue-light blush
of your room’s true season and just as quickly, elapsure. (?)
you said the weather over the phone, and i believed you
so much. i wonder where this chasm between us is kept,
at each of our chests’ centre divot? who knows? “i only
follow instructions as far as around the corner, and
after that, it’s this century’s jazz age!” figuring out
what to do at the vacuum you go all day for myself,
i ask what to do when the world’s not having you over.
————————
re-reading blake’s take of genesis in milton, it’s in
the just-keep-repeating of these strange names he makes. jesus!
it’s an anniversary, slow town calendar christmas
already? what adversary fucks the burning turkey?
what’s the boundary? what’s core? feeling four folds to the world,
till i am whose memory am i in(?). what’s mortal, friend?
what blends? aspects sunder and link, gleam like oil will in lakes.
and our age passes, slow forum saturnalia, gone,
which offers a little peep-hole in the inspiration;
you can see my apartment over the cemetery.
feels cement, this christmas body, holds weight closely without
bending elbows as the unchanging lamb in my landscape
paint. there are days i feel the furniture, and there were days
i re-read calamities all to experience being
shook wide open to the world as petroleum close as
undertow. still, whole generations of name intimate
this cooking dance, these physical wafts, crackles on the skin,
the exact moment the night’s ever irreversible,
all our heated porcelain, candles flimsily shadow,
festive and horizonless, our table’s all over this.
————————
“it seams sleep,” (seems?) one of the last things the c.p. told me,
leaning deliberatively into the homophone,
before peacing out this winter, “the coincident slow.
somehow, the possibility keeps deep ahold of me.
that was slow town. where i arrived, as a piece of the earth
was under my feet. impossible to think i exist
and it can’t.” and my contretemps, a hot stone in my throat,
was decided silence as the rhythm we kept caved in
with no generative negative, just – blip – an angel
at the terminal: forward end out without turning round.
bye-bye. my life, the more i am awake, is dream enough;
it’s relentlessly charming. the discreet pleasure, thinking
lower velocity, seeps out. doppled through the window
is a quick city evangelism, a rumbling
current all ontario won’t do to make sense of its
bad metabolism, worse attitude. necessity
demands, and the mayor calls the cops; that motherfucker
can’t stop himself. still, with all of the time i know i have
lately, an active slow – thorough – dreams itself in action:
glittering open, the gate there is a contradiction.
————————
“but slow town should also be subject to a committee,
read the contrapuntal city jazz (t. morrison) has.”
“read more history too, intimacies and their patterns,
who’s occulting who from whom. you never knew what hit you.”
brickery colloquy, we are meeting in the valley.
i’ve been needing to know more slow people. i realize
speaking, eye contact, doing the detective-of-textures
thing is composing social slow over monotony
(those heraclitean duodes). this long flux is for us.
this beautiful scenery of browns, beige, and green water
flowers over. love’s got something outrageous in common.
making friends, maybe dangerous, is form and content in
cooking up a moment, sometimes a decade, all soft-edged,
calls itself forth, yet another tutelary daemon:
here, in the long reeds, it’s not as though we are camouflaged.
relax, love’s courageous if an omen as well as loss.
long as you know you’re living, be the bodacious gaucho.
i won’t get the reference, but we’ve all got exposition
to give and you can also be an enigma to me.
even here, between hills, we’re all still. such a vertigo.