modular essay

The modular essay.

A bit part composition
That frames the shored up snows that creep through
And into the assemblage of parts.

It's plane extends as pieces begin to collect, it's dimensions shift and take up new configurations.
I am surprised by its tenacity to cause a frictive sense of generation.

Benjamin was assembling Passagen-Werk. The quotes and scraps cobbled into the famed montage, then the dialectical image. I think of the snowy streets of Paris and the sheltered arcades. The juxtaposed revelation and deceit.

I came upon a modular home one day: it's cubical connections and array of spaces seemed so organized. A veritable spatial neoliberalism.

This two-bit composition: a modelled modular, confirmed through transductive geuss-werk- a veritable political irony.

Drought

it's a drought you know

that consumes more than flash floods

the tense winds of whips and quips

that fly along barren 'scapes

it's the lack, the without, the beginning

of an end that you see

from the start

a precipice that you shy from at every breath

it's a love you know

that carries waters

like leaves on trees wind-swept and torn by time

it is the failing light and the sun that disappears behind the clouds

it's time, an imperceptible movement of seconds, moments

with no signifier, no reference point

to hold sway against the passage of beat upon beat

of your heart

it's a drought when water does not quench

words do not abate the barren days

nor reach the stone in your chest

that sits like a wayward symbol of disdain

the flood is the moment revealed, you know,

when the street lights illuminate only

the ground below, looking up does not blind,

nor burn, nor starve for want of water.

machines of such precision

I stood between                
the towering shelves
of third-world labour        
in the local Dollarama.

 the shelves grew towards the ceiling

saturated, angels dripping melting macabre faces down on decorative demons, the shaping of worlds in twisted lethargy  

anxiety grew,
fellow shoppers became hogs grunting in the muck, rolling in the excrement of exploitation.

then they were machines
filling their baskets
in mechanistic harmony

rote shopping etiquette.

the shelves seemed alive.

Imagined Nation

05/29/06

Call it what you want
the placating drone of monotonous voices,
of repeat and repeat and repeat,
rhetoric replete like cascading tomes of
hate hate hate

Call it what you want
a war, a slaughter, an invasion
of persuasion, a coercive
combination of minds that bend
for more to blood to spend
an empty recitation of the mantra
of democratization

The moans of ringing phones
of hands, of questions
mothers tears shatter the monotone
in staccato sobs that pierce
cool, clean night air and take
babies in arms

Those bringers of arms
marching macabre of unified uniforms
so alike, indistinguished lock step
locked breath, bullet proof vests and chests
heave when babies are not bulletproof

Grave diggers for bags of bones, for tombs that are filled,
as tears fall, as words become dull
and drown the pierce through the heart as blood spills,
as from lips as condolences,
as respite for a soldiers number of kills,
and well-wishing patrons of the imagined nation
offer just cause through the seething of their
black blood, the virus of the infected,
the moral of their invective.

The parceled, compacted, contracted
lies, the simple words, flourish of flies, rhetoric
of the right
of the mighty morality of destruction
of the seduction of reconstruction
the betrayal of the silent night.

In folds of feeble diatribes, swaddled
in the veins of the righteous unrighteous
the imbibed morality of criminality
the justification for annihilation
of babies born on the wrong side
of the imagined nation.