night vision

down in the underground city, the night is the underside of the ocean, littleluminsecent phytoplankton, swimming stars. below the highrises decrepit grown up from seed, their trunks of glass, their stone mouths, their headless stares. the wail of ambulances, the roars of subways, the clattering of ghosts.

cities show their best sides at night. during the day, they are bleak, hard places, like dried up sea floors, but at night the cities becomes the homes of nightpeople, outsiders, the darkness comes in like a protective mother, brings the walls in closer, the streets draw in, the lights come on like a drunken magic show, every weird or unwanted person lives at night - every strange job is done, after the lifeblood is dreaming soundly. cops, street cleaners, drug dealers, emergency room nurses, smoking 24 hour convenience store clerks, bouncers, and all the beautiful and ugly gods masquerading as hookers, madmen, drug addicts, police, drifters, predators, insomniacs. the night is the underground day.

so many of these gods have passed the corner, down this street or this alley, slept in this dark park, that at night the air wakes with their trails of spirit left in it. these memories cannot be seen but felt by night vision - on any corner have been magnificent meltdowns, casual dooms, questions of eternity by impending suicides, heartbreaks of lunatics, theologies of crackheads, revolutions invented by runaways, romances of the unemployed. serious duels took place down some alley, treason against friends hatched by the glow of mcdonalds - humans blossomed greatness under all minute conditions, even in this hell and tyranny of machines and advertising.


and it goes like this: far down is the rock and the soil, crushed on top of that is a layer of ancient history - the foundations of cabins, buried horses, fence posts, old trash. then comes the great tunnels - the fat sewers, mazes of subways, hidden holes, underground parking lots, steel bars, humming wires, dead bodies under the headstones, silent basements, secret bunkers, waterlogged archives, flooded rooms. then - a thin layer of ashphalt, the roots of persistent dandelions, the roots of jailed trees, concrete, more wires, staircases, shoes, piss, cardboard boxes, car tires garbage cans faces of sleeping gods rats stones syringes abandoned notes cigarette butts old gum

and the rest you know: streetlights, story after story of squares of light and darkness, giant lcd screens - then the tops of skyscrapers, serenely blinking red airplane warning lights, bank insignias, then the great mother ocean, smog or a star.

who could pray for the nightpeople? how could we ever praise or honor them enough, like people used to for the gods of spring or lakes or death?

the american civil war

i'll try to explain this, but i don't know if it will come out right. a long time ago, in the united states, they had themselves a civil war. a lot of people shot each other, burned down a lot of things, mostly people died from the sicknesses that accompany deprivation. which is what happens in war, apparently, all the good things that make life worth living kind of get destroyed.

the civil war was a kind of madness that overtakes people sometimes. there really isn't much to justify it, slavery wasn't abolished until about halfway through the war, and then only as a strategic decision. lincoln's desire throughout the war was to keep the "union" together. which is a nonsensical reason to kill hundreds of thousands of people. so in essence lincoln was as insane as the mad hatter. robert e lee, who ordered a suicidal charge at gettysburg, sat on his horse and met the troops returning, blooded and broken, repeating "i'm sorry, i'm sorry" - because he had ordered them into a futile attack. and for this he is seen as noble. but of course, he was doing that so that his bosses back in the south could keep whipping and raping and crushing the life out of black people. so robert e lee's notion of nobility is insane.

lee

despite the protests of southerners, the confederacy's desire for independence was insane too. they were in a huff because they thought lincoln might end slavery, so they decided to leave the union of the united states. that's a pretty terrible reason, however you look at it. they were willing to kill a bunch of people to defend their culture, which was a disgusting culture not worth saving. it was based on the notion that white people should dominate millions of black people. if the south were not part of the united states but existed in some asiatic country - say cambodia - it would be scorned as brutal and uncivilized tyranny.

there are many stories of individual heroism and villany. this is what made the mythology. the union soldier macpherson once rode accidentally into a battle only to run up against a wall of confederate soldiers. they ordered him to surrender. instead, he doffed his hat, turned around, and rode for his own line. the confederate soldiers shot him in the back. that was sad, but as a soldier, macpherson often told his men to ride into a hail of gunfire. and perhaps, had he lived, he would have gladly joined his buddy custer when he went to kill indians after the war. the men and women who acted in extraordinary fashion in a cause that should have sent most of them to an insane asylum do seem heroic and villanous, if only you forget they were killing each other to keep a country together whose main goal was to wipe out the natives who lived there and take their land, or keep a country apart so that they could keep torturing and crushing the life out of people who had another colour of skin.

custer

there is a new way of telling this story, that the civil war didn't need to be fought because they could have found another way to end slavery. this is the view of ron paul and other crackpots. this ignores of course, that the war was fought to preserve slavery, so that it couldn't be ended. and to this day the south is much like what nazi germany would have been like had they grown old. they lost their enthusiasm and so mellowed out like an abusive grandfather. blacks are still treated like dirt in the south, its just less hysterical now.

the north's victory over the south was hardly a noble one. within ten years the era of jim crow laws came into being, and the south remained very much a racist society for oh - a hundred years, and even now "southern culture" is still treated fondly and patronizingly, as if pompous elitism were somehow charming, and puffy white ignoramuses still lead them into brutal and idiotic political tragedies. the freeing of the slaves led to a society so resentful of black people that between the end of the war and about the mid-1960s they were lynching - that is, torturing and murdering black people - at about 2 or 3 a week at its height.

what all this shows is that despite all the mythology of a noble victory, the truth is the united states is a place caught between extremes of evil and good, and the compromise is ugly and unhappy. the civil war wasn't between two americas, it was between america and itself, and humanity an afterthought. and to this day that country still struggles to admit its own horrific soul. and every victory comes at a cost that defies its rationale.

residential schools

amnesia is a self-inflicted wound. its the wound that follows the wound. in olden times, it was never the cut that killed you, it was the gangrene and the rot. black holes are implosions that suck in everything around it, so the physicists say, until even light can't escape. until you cannot see it anymore. we only know its there because its twisting everything around it, getting bigger and bigger.

a long time ago there was a big turtle. it lay in the middle of a big lake, happily gurgling the water and watching the world as slowly as it takes a cloud to drift from one side of the sky to the other. the turtle was so big and slow that grass and trees and even littler lakes grew on its happy back. every once in a while it took a walk around the lake and the animals used to roll on their backs laughing at the sight of those trees and bushes and little hills of mud rocking crazily back and forth as the turtle lurched on its lakey tour.

but mostly it just sits and breathes and watches the fishes go by.

and then one day the animals decided it was safe to sit on the turtle's back, and so they did and tested the ground. and then after a little while they began to make little dens and nests and caves. crows and foxes and owls and bears and deer and wolves and sparrows came. and they made children and soon enough the grandchildren of the animals thought the turtle's back as the best house in the world.

and one day, wouldn't you know it? the crows and the wolves and the deers and the bears gave birth to the little people, who danced and roamed around on the turtle's back and swam in his lakes all the while he gurgled happily in the great big lake he mostly half-slept in.

and the little people, swimming around, discovered the turtle's head one day, his eyes and his gurgling mouth and his fat nostrils. and they told their parents all about it, the land is alive! it's actually a big turtle! and everyone then was very careful how they treated the ground they walked on, so as not to disturb their benefactor.

and so things passed for a good long time.


but then one day big black boats appeared at the turtle's back. and other little people came onto the edge. some said they were from another turtle far away, others said they came from hell. wherever they came from, they appeared to be very lost, because they were looking for something they could never find. they were angry and scared. they kept thinking everything was going to bite them. and every time something didn't bite them, like a shrub or something, they laughed nervously and and kicked it and bit it and showed the others there was nothing to fear. and if something, say a mischievous wolf, bit one of them, they all gathered together and chased the bastard down as if it were the end of the world.

and they built towns and forts on the turtle's back and cut down many old trees to build the houses. and they didn't like the little people who lived there, and tried their best to make these people talk and act like them, so that they could trust them. but the little people didn't want to be like them and there were many problems.

and once the nervous people were strong enough and the little people weak enough, they began to steal their children and teach them how to be more like them. they stole as many as they could, and they stole many. they taught the children of the little people how to be like them, how to be not like their parents, and then they sent them home. it was a strange plan. but scared people do all sorts of strange things. for you see, they are so afraid of dying that they try to kill everything that will make them die until the world is full of death. and everyone has to put up with them and be changed forever by them.

and the children of the little people grew up lost like the nervous people. lost on their own turtle's back. and they were sad and broken, like the trees the nervous people chopped down. just like them. this went on for years, and all the while the nervous people built cities on the turtle's back and big towers of black smoke and green smoke, and they dug big holes in the turtle's back. and the children of the little people, running lost among the strange tangle of highrises and highways and open-pit mines, even though they were lost, so that they could barely remember the forests of the turtle's back, still groaned aloud when they saw the holes in the turtle's back.

and this is the story everyone tries to forget

the rocks

the waves keep coming up against me, the riddles, the edges. the great ocean lurching, all the giants, a scared child, a billion scared children heaving forward, rocking back, over generations and generations, waves and waves. the now just a stick in the water of the great amniotic blue. i breathe the air of it, smell the water of blood and dirt and generations of trees, the grandfathers of these cedars, and their grandfathers, all in this dirt, the ones that stood alone and while the anishnaabe woman walked between them, the irish farmer against them, the drunken bush boys that punched each others' faces in the holy eternity of cedars.

i see the movements of people and trees, seeking peace and finding war. i see me (as in - us), swarmed with imaginary myselves, what could have beens, what weres, what i thoughts i wasses. the warm or cold days. the kid in the toronto jail "well, at least i gave you something to talk about" trying to make me or us something worthy other than a spectacular sorrow, because violence is funny to those because its funny because its true. these ancient romans disguised as canadians, these natives disguised as ancient history, these histories informed they are not present and should go home, even though they eddy around their legs. even though they flood the future.

but i have faith in you, the same kind of faith i have that these sleeping throbbing cedars will breed new cedars next spring; some among the coast salish say there are tunnels running among the mountains and the rivers, that connect this place to that. they find dead bodies of failed travellers at their mouthes sometimes. i feel old, like a stone in some valley with moss and dead bugs all over it, ready to turn back into rivers of fire a billion years from now like i did a billion years ago. but when that comes i'll be different, i'll be also all these memories of when it was now and young and rare and the skies were tangled in the planet's hair.

i am a thing that is moved by all the animals inside me and all the ones outside me. but a billion year old stone is a god in the river. i was once an ocean of fire that made all of you, and will be that ocean again. all i have to do is be still while i am walked across, you and a thousand wolves, and i am so still that when you pass it takes a million years, and the silence in me is an ocean,

light

its one of the things, youknowandsaid, its a molecule and a force and a wave but its everywhere but you cant touch it yet it is captured by leaves a million times a day and encased in sugar and there you exercise it as energy and thus you move and feel and gesture and talk and form and if you were still you would cease to exist; it can be broken into colours, because each colour is just a different speed of light, and if there were no eyes we would feel these colours as heat and is heat is the exhaust of energy which can be neither created nor destroyed and heat comes from the transformation of one thing into another, and transformation is motion, moving from one thing into another, moving from one moment into another, when a plant grows it is moving very slowly, when you move you are growing very quickly, light is the part of the atom that broke off and veered off into spaceand it can be slowed down or sped up and nothing moves faster than light einstein said but he also said i made that up because its the only way everything i said makes any sense, and maybe there would be no you, no laughing, no thoughts, no pain, no bullshit or drama or paintings or touch or violence if there wasn't light, bleeding out of the sun omnidirectionally which means in all possible directions because it is a sphere and this is the world you sit in casually, and in the beginning all things were hydrogen which is the simplest atom in the universe and it is by smashing hydrogens together, they say, that you get heliums, and by smashing that together you get other stuff and so on eventually and all the time and every time the little simple atoms smash together they leave a little debris called light which is how we all move and essentially this means we are congealed light in complicated forms

rivers

i'll never be a lot of things. mayor or president, for instance. and i don't believe in genesis, but i don't believe in the big bang either. so much for me, rootless. no gang to join. if they got me now there'd be no one to revenge me. ah well. speachless, speakless, spokeless. frozen river. i'm alone, i need a spirit to talk to tonight, some ghost. a man with a sparrow's head in a pinstripe suit. here he comes. he slams a knife into the table between us.

"buy me a drink?"

"sure, they're selling a local dark"

"tell them to bring it to me in a discarded coffee tin"

the bartender, with her crow's smile, never left the bar. she and the sparrow smile at each other. she dips the coffee can into the night and he draws it from the window, drinks it and let's the dark run down his face. a blast of noise burps above us, above the ceiling.

"where you from?"

"out there, no one invites me inside anymore"

"they forget"

"aha"

the ceiling bends down and it rumbles and it groans

"what the fuck are they doing up there?" asked the sparrow and lit one of my cigarettes

"it's a ritual. they turn their souls inside out" i explained.

"good idea. do they have to bust the ceiling like that?"

"yes, i think so. can you do magic?"

"sure, kid." he pulled his sleeves, showed the inside of the left one to me. i squinted down into it, saw a tunnel in it, underground rivers, water falling into caverns and bats and rats.

"that's some shirt"

"thanks, my mother made it for me"

we both drank quietly. a bunch of night spilled out the sides of the can, splashed little black forevers on the table and the floor.

"no stars" i commented.

"there are not necessarily stars in night" said the sparrow

"that's your knife?" i asked

"knives belong to those that hold them" he said

"god, it's true"

"can i come with you?"

"sure"

we left the bar, discarded the contents of our pockets upon the floor, sewing thread, radical pamphlets, shards of mirrors, butane lighters, cameos, bits of candle, lighting bolts, dry tears, stray tones, poison eye, crayfish claws, old keys, fish heads, stones that crawled into our shoes, somehow,

i took him along the river's edge, he played with little fires in his hands and threw them up into the air, watch them trail downwards like leaves, blue fires, red fires, purple fires. he danced around in circles, threw up a green fire and made a face

"the birds are all confused, have you noticed? they're flying north and west and only sometime south," i said

"they will find their way, i think," he said, "but who knows, with all these machines, what they will change"

"and then?"

"the green gods buried themselves far down in the earth, and they crawl around down there, filling their wombs with seeds, and roots, garbage, decomposing trees. they live for millions of years, you know, far beyond you and me, they don't care about hiding a few thousand ages, and look..."

he pointed up with one clawed hand at the sky, unsounding, where storms writhed around, big black night clouds, each one a fat monster bigger than a city

"once i stood on top of a mountain," i said to him,"and could see everything. groves, hills, little rivers, single trees and whole forests. and i saw a herd of wild horses. stallions and mares and foals, all fugitive and wandering in this neverending wilderness. they were grazing in a little field. there was not a road or anything like that to be seen. they lived in the foothills of the rocky mountains. i watched them, they couldn't see me, and i watched them breathe. and i adored them, and then, there was something no one heard, and they lifted their heads and ran into the forest, undulating in their running like a lake of muscles and wild sex. ran into the wilderness on an instinct. and it was this then that i learned i was a body, made of so much water, and stones, calcium for bones, iron tasted on a cut finger, carbon like a coal mine, like burned wood, like me,"

"you are so little" said the sparrow, and the moon gave birth to a salmon that swam through the aurora borealis like seaweed