10.4.08

New Translations For Prince George

Be what you can make at the moment, extend your hands into jacket pockets, and guard a heart that pulsed irregularly offbeat because you forced it to slow down while you stood around waiting in your duckboots for far too long.
You've got to start treating this life like it was something that you consumed, you must not call here or there the victor, they are two things that recycled all the rivers into pumping veins, and though you've gone back to the south, you have yet to find all the different ways one can arrive home.
And remember, it's not who they made you, it's not how they asked you to abandon the revolutionary, it's not how you began to find wars on the land, worlds that reaked with the mask of death and threatened the person that was filming it behind euro-canadian camera lenses.
No, it's not only that.
It was the switching of pronouns. It is when 'you' became 'I' and 'they' became singular.
And these anxieties? I'll forget the written ones, they're just writings of themselves. I'll show the blood in dark blues and grays, because I've learned that when a leaf falls here it just depends on the growing discoloration of sky,a north wind, and the asthma that chokes us.
It makes us leave so soon, oscillating with the birds in mid-flight toward bluer skies with the power of an innocuous breeze.

So save up more sweet-tasting alcohol , I've got difficulties to raise flags for, to break bones with, and to hoist up next to hastily blowing sails.
And while I've kept you updated,
It's always had to go through translation,
Somewhere between the west coast and central mainland.
Part North and Part South, I come undone up on cranbrook hill, I lost direction and I lost place. I hoard ghosts and flood them with memories of hometowns, I focus on bleeding and the distant echoes of ocean tides, I live in music and count all the ways in which cynicism distracts from life,
yet I do little about any of it.
I become too conscious of closure.
I try too hard to translate my goodbyes.
I try too hard to make them clearly phrased and technical.
But this landscape holds more than a the constant brooding to find that perfect goodbye, it holds a wish for more.
More dirt, more frost, more death, more cancer.
Grime has a way of becoming romantic, and it sticks to you like a first kiss.
It's this northern BC thing.
It's this air pollution that does not let us see the stars that we once forged our hearts in.
And knowing we can search for more than dead trees and foggy skies, we modify our environment, we re-write our truths.
and I've given myself five days to re-write the definition of Fort George
because when a frozen town un-thaws, it leaves more puddles than a rain forest ever could.
and I see more of my reflection saturated in the dirty gravel ground every time I walk back
from the university to home,and so I know I'm already melting with it.

No comments: