Run and Store

Hide and go seek, keep your creeps close: your open eye gander panders your loose looks, your seeps boomerangs back your foraged fears, your tye-dyes your feedback, your feats freaked. Out.

And how it falls, it hovers . . .

Where we ghost when we forget to while. Where we cover our tracks. Howl. Or how for a while . . . where we grip too tight, hold two minutes too long and ruin embrace. Where we shift and displace our haunt, where we cower, where we creep. Where we wish we could enact formula.

hover

And our shift is a burl, tuft that shifts liftless to cower. A kitten in a gunny sack on the prowl. A lost key. A forgotten salt lick, ill maintained.

I wanted to begin again but when I held out my hand the binding slipped shut slipped shut and the twilight growled at noon and I knew the season was sinking in a draft not a howl.

Where a road is a button, a mark impressed, a stiick shifted, a dot tied down with a thread. And fences are lanes that people walk through, they open gates, shift switches and walk through our front doors, fuck with home. Remake the front door. Shift arrows. The  forever-kids who yard and yard back/front/side – art and craft property to gripless. Hide and seek to let, to loose.

And we fold and unfold and tumble down the stairs, mourn the mixtape.

We long for red thread that will bind us in to a furling linearity that we can call complete. So we can say: This is shadow.

A bounded leap, wrapped: complete

How did your bunk bed become your work desk?

It is time. Time to prepare for the future. There will be nowhere for you to sleep.

We experience bark in cycles, in our journey home from the ferry on the path in the dark.

We don’t want to want eyes.

*

Yesterday we came up with an extremely productive work strategy: the communal nap. Collaborators enter a heightened state of focussed concentration towards resolving narrative or structural inquiries in the performance piece. Dreams yield extremely viable solutions.

Especially when the soundtrack is this:

Today was another long work session but we channeled the Banff Centre and scheduled one full meal during a reasonable dinner hour. We are writing new text, new songs and prepping for our first meeting with our shadow puppeteer Sean Frey, tomorrow!

Sweet Island dreams under the supermoon . . .

kb, er, di, cj

Ghosts of Plastic Past

Yesterday we went for a walk along Gibraltar Point beach and collected bits of glass that were tucked in the sand . . .

This afternoon while doing research for Osculations I learned a couple of frightening things – one is that excepting the plastic ‘eliminated’ from the planet through incineration, every piece of plastic ever created is still in existence (in some form) today. Plastic does not disappear. It is lost (and found) at sea, it is broken down into plankton size pieces that are consumed by fish and turtles and marine mammals but it is not digested, it is not transformed. Part of our piece is about the floating island of plastic in the Pacific the size of a CONTINENT that is known as the Garbage Patch. There is a naturally occurring gyre in the Pacific Ocean – a gyre is essentially a natural vortex, there are five major oceanic ones –

and this gyre has become a repository for disposed plastics, which are broken down by the ocean currents, salt, and sun into smaller and smaller pieces that can be found from the surface to 100 metres below sea level . . . scientists describe the ocean water in their study as a ‘plastic soup’ – and their study area within the Garbage Patch is the size of Texas – TWICE. This plastic makes it way back to land in some fairly gruesome ways, grounding albatross chicks indefinitely:

If you eat seafood (especially filter feeders), you’re eating plastic. Plastic returns to us: cosier, filtered through time and ocean. It won’t break down, but it will open us to the possibility of immortality. How fast lasting forever has changed the world . . .

In a very short period of time, we will be able to walk the shore and find the kernels of sand are composed not of coral or rocks but plastic . . . and it won’t be hard to stroll the length of the beach and collect buckets of our indestructible nostalgia.

As you were,

kb

PS. You can see more images of the effects of our desire for and disposal of plastics on Midway’s albatrosses documented by Chris Jordan here.

Honest with the wholves

Old enough to know I’m not the only poet who is haunted. Outrunning them for a long time, but the wholves caught up, found me out, tore me open. No more sleeps, wicked dreams, a wealth of broken glass, ghostbites, hoofscars, torn up lists, shaky palmed plans. An era of claws for glossas, curved teeth standing in for stanzas, ripped up rip tide rogue sentences shorn to useless unbridled bits.

How much are we all willing to reveal about our darkest parts and hours? Not much, I wager.

Everyone breaks, eventually. I am missing several puzzle pieces, but I circle the dark, the dark loop and hesitation.

And now welcome this eviction: to bliss, fresh air, infinite possibility:

A soundtrack for turmoil n insomnia . . .

Trip Domino

All this plummet and no grace,

messy sinking suns and the suddening twilight causing pedestrian dysfunction on 7th and 8th, stumbles fumbling in heartache – all that dark to go home alone to no one in. Dead deer on Nose Hill is the huge unpatrolled expanse in which bodies fall.

Where the voice falters in misstep. I always hit the clutch too hard. I never know what to say when I can’t touch your face. Awkward socks you wore twice, crumpled. I hate the phone. The land a rough lap, a tongue of snow, 4/4 with cowbell, with crescendo. My grandmother taught us blackjack, not crazy eights. Hit me, hit me. We never fit in. We had the wrong socks. You could try to hide them, but the regular kids always saw them when we switched from our boots to our indoor shoes. I dealt you paint.

You were winning. You folded.

All the ghosts are wholves

A list of things I miss –

1) Nostalgia re-purposed.

2) Making calls to the past –

Direct Line to David Suzuki

Hoping someone picks up.

3) Crossing the body of reminding us of what we are in knot

Moving On on the Ongiara

knowing, in what we are. Remembering the way the record on repeat on the hi-fi made the twilight hum.

4) The answer in the marrow narrowing the after moon to hide and go seek

Over the railing

tag in the woods, tag between the lines.

5) Reverse delay. Sometimes it hurts so badly I must cry out loud.

Hind sight haunched

I carved and hollowed our hind days. What we voted on in the past is what we are not now, knots knowing how to tear our selves away from the map of the key to the suite of swallowing compassion.

6) I’ve got an answer. How about flight?

Ring around the noonlight

This does not mean I don’t love the land I left, I do. That eyeland is for always.

I’ve got your listening. And you make it what have you got to sparrow.

Tok-yo?

Autumn: season of phone calls and one-way flight segments. This morning in line at the airport for my gate, paying attention and queing like the good ques for salvation. Thinking about burning questions, flight through holes. Thinking about port towns without Touchtone, direct lines, how as we age we can (end)compass the true mournful howl.

AC009 to Tokyo: suddenly disoriented since I’m supposed to be en route to Cowtown but the sign says Japan not Alberta. Thinking I’ve grosslymiscalculated. But I’m in the right line, booked on a flight stopping over in Alberta, one of maybe a dozen passengers set to disembark for disenchantment at YYC. Such a relief to take flight with announcements in Japanese so I could convince myself I’m only halfway towards my final destination.

Such destination a final relief towards taking

halfway flight only with myself announcing confidently I could try

Land ho

in a new language. I’m tested in November anyway. You want to know I desire fluency. You want to know whether. Or the how of what you wish to know in another time zone: the avant after post, the whereable of the keeper of questions let. Want me to hold, push dimension.Be grammatically accurate.

I’m dialing tone, requesting feedback, hoping you’re in the space between spaces sending a smoke signal my technology will register.

I might ride the river, but it’s no saviour: no one can be saved by less than asking if the path from Wards Island can let go our hope for names . . .

ferry me home

Make what I covet into home. Not an address, postal code, or box with a key that stills my lot to me – I want people that build the Point, and keep her.

Still me by letting me know what T’oh covets, though knowing him makes me want East. Home West? How now?

Around Here

Back where I’m meant to be making meaning make sense of all the split paths I’m on. Twilight picnics, dawn wanderings, birds on the sill, coons hissing goodnight topside of the ceiling panels, bats in the hall, moths in my bed, working on work and ideas to push words over into other media.

Living weird no lack of wonderful, where Eyelanders make magic from debris, make worlds that move us into liminal drift:

Raft by Joshua Brandt

;where punctuation is determined by where we anchor and where we rift

the guide the shore, the shore a road riddled with unridable paths we cannot help but cross: thanks to friends who don’t hold out, who hold us up, who hold us, who hold open everything. Who are on the same ride, even if it’s off kilter.

Magic Bus by Manuel Cappel

And we are itching to be smitten with a biting obsession over an idea that has to be written in beams and blood. Culling nightmares for ambition and forlonging. Is the hardest part parting from familiar or embracing the terrifying to ignite the rough draft?

Mouth by Dream

There are no sides, only damp sheets or refrains in minor keys while we struggle to record the day’s score, keep the flowers flowering on the garden vegetables, the dishes clean, breathebodydon’tmove while the cat preens in the courtyard and looks you in the eye with wild.

How to feral and corral at once. How to paddle and motor, anchor and swim, problematize, let go. How to light the bonfire, dive off the old intake valve, shed, clothe, send postcards, get bills, dance in the sand and demand that your other life meets you halfway around here.

To strange expectation. To banjo a mountain, ferry a dune, scrawl on sawblade.

To howl.

PS> Music to read my post to:

Silver Carred

It’s crazy-makin’ hot at the Art Hospital, even though we live by the lake.

I was silver-carred on my journey to make it here . . .