old and new scraps

Two Haikus

Spring York Strike Vote Fail:
The Workers Control the Means
of Punctuation?

Haiku for Hitler
Volkswagon bumper sticker:
Reich built, Kike driven

water strider:

we commit
to always leave room

between our wings.
to be brother, lover, comrade,

friend in struggle
let us be like two ships

on the same river.
i accept responsibility to

stay clear of your ship.
you are at the rudder

you are the rudder
some days, you

steer into me
hard

and deep.
some days you aim away, light

air and a fire in your own chambers
scribble quill notes

in your private nautical guide
as I scrub the deck boards

clean in suds and lye
contentedly working, whistling

a tune at the horizon's sun.
aware of you up in your cabin

above, free of me.
yet you return

like the gulls
that gather on the mast

(2015)

&

dents de lait
- for an old friend

two little nothings under a bridge
sheltering from the wind and rain

two little nothings ousted

from prickly nests

you, "petite belette aux dents de lait"
me, "gentle and proud," ripping your guts out

throwing eggs, boiling 30-cent noodles cracking

shells inside the freezer

I screamed and shoved

you in the freezer, little egg,

boiled you in the Mr. Noodles and left

your shell cracked in the stinking trash

before I knew how to compost, cook

pad thai, write a Thesis on Class Theory in Canada

before, before all that comfort and respect

ability, when I was skinny and hurt and raw,

I burnt you under my tongue, then cuddled you, to comfort

you, warm your hands under blankets torn and dirty

in a little dirty room by a ten-cent lamp. In that tiny space

you paid for with your life's hours on the treadmill of 6.85 per

hour we could reach up to touch the ceiling
and were masters in our own little world of dreams

by dollarstore lamplight in my messy teenage bedroom
in my parents’ oh-so-carefully clean house you

sleeping quietly on my single bed tired old sheets twisted
after coming down from our friend Sid I watched and thought if

only, if only I could bring you to our own little world away
from all this where we would be safe and loved

by the yellow lamplight your dark hair thick

like lostness, your pale skin sallow like hunger and

chainsmokes petite boulette we had to face the world
two little nothings the scars still bleeding

young blood on our backs slowly,
slowly, dripping our milk away with the tiny

tigercat teeth of kittens we
"passed it back and forth

in a passionate kiss
from my mouth to yours" cutting as we kissed,

bleeding as we cupped the cuts with razersharp

hands given to us by generations of fear

(I seem to recognize your face
haunting, familiar, yet I can't seem to place it
cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
lifetimes are catching up with me)

flight risk/hold

"flight
risk"

risk flight.

violence? valiance?
fought valiantly for

a hundred thousand
gather

bail

...
shatter

hold
we hold you
"they are being held"
flight risk
shatter
hold

postcards
books barred
azkeban, dispossessed
bodies barred
postcards
post bail

hold
gather
letters
gather

wings
flight
risk

(June/July 2010 - post G8/G20 toronto
-dedicated to Mandy, Alex, and Leah, arrested at gunpoint in the middle of the night...)

&

Commons:
Hegemony,
the joining of hedges in holy matrimony
private space marries its neighbor
eats the commoners
urban motion collapses the gaps
easy money: leave no agora untried.

close the garage door
arm the alarm, ignore ragpile in doorway
hedge funds spell out on TV screen
as public
spaces line up for the shooting squad
ready or nautious

capitalism is sic sic sic
lical

(2008)

&

1. How do security systems see?
Everything that moves is a danger.

2. Naturalized:
“The newspapers unfortunately just report on the reality...”
criminality, genetic inferiority, history apart

3. Naturalized:
white settlers sink into the snow upon landing
one foot on this soil and they are one of us
naturalized, made natural made one of us.

4. We are not allowed to name our –
the dark secret I tie up in ribbons
twist round a chickenbone
a wishbone of secrecy a tiny tourniquet
if you deny it blood, it will drop off and die

5. not true. The traces are gangrenous,
speak of the serrature, lines of dark lines of white
lines of power in the silent unnamed
one foot in the snow
one in the sand
the mark of Cain on your dark face
the mark of Cain on my light face

6. the silence makes my mark invisible
makes entrenched power
walls of stone, like encampments, encroachments,
enactments on the CBC with
minor players wiping aprons in the kitchen, dying in the background
dark like the earth, evincing blood, eviscerated
in Faulkner fictions of Light in August,

August arrests, roundups in pre-dawn raids by the Lake,
bodies standing out in silhouette on the snow near Toronto
a white string to mark an invisible centre
at the scene of a body dragged into silence

(2005)

&

A-list

i list inside
an aching ship

pan-seared spirit
hands burnt down
down by the bottom line

write list
never done
never time

clean the rind
right a rhyme on the side
the daily slide
into high-end housing

i list inside
a stinking ship
taking on water

working to the clock.
blistering heat of the market

(Excerpt from M'AIDEZ chapbook
spring 2012)

I couldn’t live on that,

so all I do is work

income in coming trickle away
and what I really want to say is

we can/t carry each other but
meanwhile I'm fucking against the wall
plundering your smell and our pleasure
the edge of the bourgeois world

there's a hunger in your belly
i would taste it if i touched you
my plump bones remember skin on sinew.
and what i really want to say is

we all seek shelter. so: many die
lists of names on the notice board
read out her voice carries
drums to heal the hurt places in a neighborhood this

is where she fell this is where i hid this is where
i could hide if i had to

let my ground ground you too
so we can push together

twisted gut and what I really want
to say is that having fucks me up
as it heals me cuz it heals me alone

i watch from the awning. it rains on them both.
she screams: five bucks for a drink he got 45 million
from my family and he won't give me five bucks for a drink.
get away from me bitch. he says walking towards her.

coffeeshop behind me. five bucks on the counter
taste hot mocha in my mouth.

(Excerpt from M'AIDEZ chapbook
spring 2012)

Spinal Cordial you-tinted air drifts toward me across the room i do not notice till that scent drifting, a fish in lake scent wakes	that lake scent turn face, go catches me seiner net animal core-
-dial words drift spinal cordial introduce your mother discuss the weather	kindness all polite words shake, smile night's event
we drift off homeward that scent follows me	separate a lost lake

(2013)

&

Raw Materials (excerpt)

Maple Leaf makebelieve
turn this land massive unseeded
seeds crushed before sprouting
soil crushed ducks drowned in huge tailings
sick electric blue
steal meddle meddle meddle
steal

raw material in a banker's box
steel, metal alloy
uranium mining is banker’s box is
steal is blue electric water toxic

allies above ground tread air
below is cut and plundered is
open sore mining is
oozing pit mining is
ecosystem rendered like raw meat

turn life
to raw material

raw, scrape trees, scrape topsoil
dig deep into earth’s raw flesh
oozing sore mining is open pit unthinkable

scrape raw materials
for banker’s box
unbearable

primary extraction

GoldmanSachs holds conference on basic materials
what are basic materials what is basic?
What is basic for life what is basic to being
an adult in this ecosystem what is required?

Goldcorp beat
expectations\processing\rendering\processing\plant\
stocks&warrants\basic materials\Goldcorp earnings
more than double in the first quarter\processing

(excerpt from Mining Justice Arts Resistance piece, Rhizome Cafe, May 14, 2011)

&

For Cynthia Oka

there are lines of dissent in our lines of descent

there are women who whisper and women who shout

there are changes our mothers can make and those that they can't

there are lines of dissent in our lines of descent

each trauma returns like a ghost from the past

the nostalgia of suffering becomes a gift of pain

coats used as blankets, long dark hallways off The Main

the battle over whose needs get met

will i carry, will i protect, the one who let—

she only had what she had and she did her best

i wished i could say, 'stand your ground. he won't leave

and if he does leave we will be alright'

there are lines of dissent within our lines of descent.

when i was nineteen, when i needed you most

when i didn't know that i could pay the rent

when i needed your strength to know my strength

tell me to test my teeth, to test my grip

to push my muscles and manage

there are lines of dissent in our lines of descent

there are women who whispered and women who shout

there are those who said: "NO." When NO is what they meant

not just for their bodies: for their minds, for their lands

for their kids' lives, for control of their own funds, their own hands

and now— I'll tell you that we can.

we'll reroute and refasten those lines through our hearts

we'll speak to our grandmothers who got us this far

across language, an ocean an army

I'll tell them: what's honest in exhaustion

what's gone for the moment

in the forgetting of my words, in the fear of my strength:

There is descent in my line of dissent

(April 18 2010 / for Vancouver Status of Women fundraiser at Rhizome Cafe / Dedicated to Cynthia Oka)

&

Occupy

if
"we are here because
you
were there"

then
we occupy because
you occupy

- we want the sky -

uncut by wires

&

WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY
SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING to bring you
a BRAND new
VAN
cou
ver

a city on steroids
cheating its way through
the public sphere

Vancouver an athlete
pumped up
cash n laughtrack injection
smiles race to finish line
PR bullets pumped and primed
media cameras preen
and poets forewarned
for appropriateness

the sheen wears thin for
those of us living in
this city

this brand new vancouver-
this bank-couver this
brand- ed new van couver
cleaned of public will cleaned
of relationship

-

after 'sue me' gets done with dissenters
and civil disobedients

after the Canadian military
cleans homeless people from our streets

Vancouver can project
a perfect picture

of an empty city

Only Quatchi alone, alone left
in the empty town square
waving HBC red mittens
in the isolated air
as canned cheers echo from pre-paid
loudspeakers

and bounce off the empty buildings
ads yell 'you gotta be here' but all of us are elsewhere
locked up, driven out, shut up, cut up,

the happiest city is an empty city,
no fuss, no muss, no demands for justice
no land title, redress
no wheelchair blockades to embarrass us

just an empty canvas
like this terra nullius
empty land fresh for corporate plunder

- - -

SO, since we're still here, and this is no empty city, this is no pure polished spectacle, this is no land of empty property values but actual land, which our actual feet walk, since we are still here and (apparently) we refuse to shut up, i've got some questions.

if the Olympics are so great
why does the IOC need to tell me
what to think about them and

if the Olympics are so great
why does VANOC need to tell this host city's
poet laureate covered in laurels that
there are appropriate themes for poetry and

why does the Cultural Olympiad need
to sign 'only happy messages'
into street musician contracts
or tell the carnival band that
the only carnival today is capital and why

does the IOC need to tell
the poets speaking on streets and
the artists trying to eat
that the Olympics must mean cheer or
that their voices won't be welcome here

(and neither will their bodies) and
that "happiness" can be bought in empty bottles?

if the Olympics are wonderful why
am I eating dinner next to more military
than I have seen since I went to Israel
when I was 19? and if the Olympics

are a celebration why does my city
feel so dangerous, hard edged and starving
in the midst of this party?
we don't tell the birds, "fly or I'll beat you" -

things that come naturally don't need the threat,
so why does Olympic cheer need this enforcement
bylaws and cameras and cop cars and contracts
copyrights that seek to muzzle honesty

the forced cheer of torch marches, helicopters circling
vultures over spectacle - flesh of the wounded

and if the games are so great then why am i
dry of words, "sharpening pencils poemless in the afternoons"
covering my head with blankets
afraid to leave the house?

police don't make me safe
strong community makes me safe and the land
being fed feeds us in return

(February 12, 2010, for Press Release Vancouver Status of Women fundraiser at Rhizome Cafe)

&

Airtight

[ [ [ [ Deportation. ] ] ] ]

[ [ [ [ YVR ] ] ] ]
[ [ [ [ A Vancouver Year ] ] ] ]

[Grey walls [swallow asylum seekers]
easy to forget]

[rooms [with no windows]
back rooms, souls buried in immigration]

[bureaucracy [ ] [ ] [ ] [terror the spine's rush]
backbone ripped out]

[bent [broken?]
in hidden back rooms]

[[ [ [ ['papieren!'] ] ] ] ]

[power to produce [weight of border]
authority]

[measured [in leather gun holster]
in legalese]

['seared [in the spine's unravelling' words already spoken]
refitted]

[unfit inadmissable [admitted destined temporary]
rejected]

[ [ [ [ [ [ [ [ mr in between takes on new meaning ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ]
What d’you say to those doors, Wah?

[sliding doors]

[invisible [immigration office]
architecture]

[designed to conceal [cold gun to temple in prim smile]
blank border office] [next to gleaming Burger King]

[forced [at international arrivals] departure]

[terrible neutral [white man]
thick head thick authority]

[broad back [up at invisible door]
architecture of concealment:]

[one-way [ticket]
glass]

[terror: [overblown bull head]
gleams in white lights, a pool cue white ball]

[sunk, in the hole, cleaned up [owns the game]
thick-shouldered, gun-holstered]

[sharp blue eyes [as men with
blink and smile no faces
at the cameras, pole bodies
flashbulbs pop] downriver]

[flashbulbs pop [white face beams]
authority into the livingrooms of the nation]

[on the tarmac planes whine, [takeoff]
bodies restrained]

[bodies digested in back rooms [back seats of airplanes]
as polite strained attendants serve: coffee, tea]

[moving doors open [walls swallow one soul]
absorb one man]

[in wheelchair, legs still, [head up]
& my spine shoots daggers]

[as hidden door opens to [sudden guns, guard standing alert to]
capture you:]

[we can accompany you no further [this time we stand]
on the shores of Forgetting]

[as businessmen] [briefcases]
[bathroom
cleaning
workers]
[tourists] [pass in a blur]
[electric-ear-coil thick-chest gun-guards]

[huddle in blue by gleaming Burger King]
[pull you down into hidden back rooms]

for the name: Sing resistance

(november 3 and 4, 2008)

(photo courtesy of dry utilities)

&

US Foreign

Cattle to the slaughter we grow louder and louder
As bombs issue from capitol hill
Public relations, simulations from
the white house of ownership, the sharp bone of authority
we threaten to capitulate under the weight
of concentrated capital

Under this mess of -- U.S.-foreign -- youaskedforit -- policy
Spurious sponsorship
&blaming the victim

find myself faced with a decision:
If - to trade on the currency of my white face
play the game, fill my plate
Begging at the table I learn "false consciousness"
If I say what you want, will you pay my rent?

Slip away from the mutilation
that arises under the guises produced
by concentrated capital
look up from the narrow vision of
table-corner-wishing scraps
and find, if i reach out, hands come back

look up-
into a sea of faces
mutuality and

anti-capitulation
(2005)

&

plane touches down
and i step out to ocean air
fluo reds at Cook Street Village the shops
and stores and coffeehouses
trinkets and tastes beckon;
instead i turn south,
down Linden to Dallas Road to the
cliff head rough cliff faces
rockhewn stairs
head down to the ocean, down to the grassy patch by
Mile Zero: TransCanada - end and beginning
plaque my friends pissed on
for fun by the ocean
down past the grassy banks
seeking the ocean's clean
down at rocky beach shore
in sunlight in the seaweed dampness
on the great rocks and small rocks pebbling i
washed in salt water eyeletted in tide pools
purple starfish tiny crabs-
the city's power steals away on well-heeled shoes-

i come up to the road again, lights distant in Cook street village
fingers on the rough cliff face, oceanside weeds cling in sweet winds
come up to the road i find i have lost my wallet
maybe had no pockets to begin with

unencumbered, free of all the trappings
i cannot make a purchase
in the town.

(2007)

&

White Alloy
(for Evie and Miranda)

you pass in front of me
my body made of mercury white alloy

reticent identities
now read in retina scan digits encoded

in databanks number nine
begins your national-rational name your nine digits read

as sin encode an expiry
on your existence like a trans
national batch of vegetables improperly transported

checkboxed rotten on arrival in port
rolled over board by border police in white

uniform nonhistory:
“there is only this moment” biometrically

encoded aluminium in my alloy bones radiation
sickness immigration sickness
state of the nation sickness state of the art

technology to read
the biometric breathing patterns of lungfish

while illegal underwater we die, drown
I in whiteness she in colour hesitant,

reticent, retinas resonate
because none is too many so save the dogs

send back the migrant girls – but
all aboard if you can clean industrial ceramic

the nation needs you lovelies - leave home, husband,
wife, life, for transitory non-existence

in a land too blight on
two finger touchdown like Kafka’s Mr. K only

this time it is
one read middle scanned for security

one resistant thumb
held away in flight

test me - heavy lead traces may grace my veins,
but the cancer is in yours one curable, one not

both alive at cost and what do I know

I haven’t studied Just worked it
and been worked over - by this metal

in my teeth these
stories of my specialness this global monotony

assembly line lives in television-crisp nuclear winter
huddled by the fire of our shared cultural survival

&

old ones...

What The Typographer Thinks While Making Love
Split me, up my thigh and down my median
rip give into one big sigh sweet and sheltered
impress
characters falling from my teeth
blinking in metalled bounce against the sidewalk
molten rectangles smelt
in foundries smelled in through and under me
flounder pick me up
Give yourself up
I'll tie hands gently over
humid skull
eyes warm
and sweet throat asking

As my moment comes, open tongued we find
type pieces blackened ink-splecked
clustered up between my cheeks
corners rubbing back ends
vowels meeting in unlikely combinations

And soft forms inked down into place
by force of will, speaking into empty space
of time, across the reach vast and impossible...

To be read someday

Meanwhile
my shout
carries out
into the street
and is lost

an impression
into
private air.

(1997 - for Montage at McGill)

&

Let me not
(inspired by a few of those upper-middle-class
hippie friends who left home with dreams of wandering)

running is good for the heart, she said. Remember that.

I look back a wave, try to muster up missing her.
she pauses, her careful hand gentle on the wrought-iron gate
as I leave home and hearth, step out into the road
nothing but my luck and her money to keep me on my feet.

On that late, strange January day, the sky blue Ontario overhead
the river unfrozen, flowing clear by springlike shores in terrible warmth
trees bud, geese collect eggs too early
I tramp along river mud growing dust to disguise me
she has dressed me too warmly, fed me too well.
I discard identity and woolly layers by the ravine,
leave a pile at the plank bridge for the next tramp to come along
the bridge where I-child pumped bike pedals as she ran alongside in sweats and sneakers

(2002)

&

War Measures

war measures:

the enemy within
war measures acts on bodies
war measures bodies
exacts sums
extracts some
contains others

war measures acts on bodies
war measures bodies
measures rights and freedoms
measures right
exacts life
measures extreme measures necessary measures

national parks minus monuments
Canadian Japanese War Measures Acts
war measures exacts extracts
war measures bodies blood race states status

small room, plastic seats
scruffy guests cookies paper staples watery coffee scrappy cut and paste search research we search
makeshift screen quick composition words of power self doubt taste of tiredness
shy voices at microphone

explode streaming live from mouth to mouth
words packed with code

reach ears denied history
Canadian Ukranian Japanese War Measures
power to know spirals up from earth through feet to core and out and out (me to you you to me “we rise rise rise”) spiralling code encode encore
our small response crystallizes resistance
watched documentary into me document history repeated
encore
core
code
encode
encore encode encore encode encore

spiralcode packed with info you can know packed
to pack we can fight back
spirals encoded beam body (resistance)
our small fractal resistance (resistance)
fractures enemy image (image enemy)
small presses small pressures but there are so many of us
satellites spinning our own gravity we
send sounds back
back to back
face to face
make our own audience

my hands hand out to you send words encoded packed to you the reviving pack
(back to back we can fight back)

Canadian Ukrainian Italian Japanese War Measures
no "fertile ground" before me
land of the free, indeed-
but fertile ground beneath me
north america land of plenty
north america land of poverty
north america land of empoverished plantings
plantation history power beginnings upon beginnings upon old traditions
tree plantings “stone and silence” and
national parks minus (national post minus)
national parks minus monuments

War Measures
war measures bodies, exacts sums
extracts some
contains others
baby extracted from body of mother
this is no fertile ground - beneath me
”soles of sneakers stick to floor like spiderman?”
cold man (burning man) glowing man in concrete cage
solitary for four years with no charges

the refugee can resist the guards
the refuge
north america land of safety-
Canadian Ukrainian Italian Japanese “Arab”

War Measures

words spiral from pen to palm through teeth and lung
code criminal code encode a criminal
"enemy aliens" 1914
"illegal immigrants" turn of century
millenial fears millenial terror again again a gain who gains?
"never again" says Mulroney
"never again elect Bush" again, again, a gain who gains:
”national parks railroads corporations golf courses cities towns" built by illegal dying hands
Canadians fertile ground

war measures
acts on bodies
war measures bodies
exacts sums
extracts some
contains others

measures extreme measures necessary measures
north america land of doublespeak and security

A Word Watches,
The World Watches
well,
we watch back.
our own satellites our own gravity our light weightlessness our own words to write

history

(2003 - for Dave Hudson and Hassan Almrei)

&

the protracted spring of my distraction

knees scraped in scrappy bike trips down pandora
in the protracted December spring
Victoria endless faerie city
if winter never comes

i hold winter inside me
memories Montreal frigidity
smoke ice-cold stares
desperate moments
scrappy knees in my only pair of jeans
bought for three bucks easy, cuz five's too much
for one pair of pants
three dollars at the Village Des Valeurs
past Barclay street – “where the pushers and syringes” were
– only not really, only I never saw any –
and where my mum said: “Don’t walk –

– only really, I just saw mums hanging out their washing on the line, kids with braids playing in the muddy alley behind my bedroom window and in the dirtpacked yards on the other side of that dotted line

– on that street, sweetie"
media fear strikes home - lonely summers

blackness the silent variable

then another neighborhood,
groceries carried in frozen skinny fingers
dodging giant buses past Bernard, shrinking
from the whine of hydro lines and expensive heated cars
freeze walking home from Quatre Frères overpriced for the yuppies who shoved us north out of the Plateau, ever north up Parc.
Despite regular deliveries of Place Publique and small warmths on the 80,
one hopeful bus driver's gift of red candies and helium balloons
tried to stand tall strung out on the silver railings -
despite despite small hopes and music in the evenings,
freezing as I tipped northward, hung on the very last
block in Mile End
leaning backwards on Van Horne’s deep underpass like a nightmare
the 161 trajectory threatens to drag me home home home to the
friendly noisy safety of Cote Des Neiges the centre of my selfhood,
and deeper west towards school in the white silent streets past
Dufferin, terrifying houses sheltered behind trees and money down
the looking glass to childhood's prim Cote St. Luc stares at my everyday red sweatpants torn to show my dirty underwear and careful upward sniffing at my sweaty tangled hair
that i wanted dirty cuz it shone more and looked more like proper whitegirl hair
and less like a jew's.

now in victoria armored in my graduate school education
whiteskin privilege and invisibility
tearing down the clean streets two-pedaled

a don't-mess-with-me kid
cuz my dad'll sue
– if only they knew.

(Vancouver Island, 2005 - unedited)

&

******************
Some other things

A Class I Taught
A Thing I Wrote
A Thing I Wrote Based on the Other Thing, That Got Published With a Friend in a Journal I Like
A Biggish Thing

and a few other things in the scrappile.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=BNlncrChYs0C&pg=PA287&lpg=PA287&dq=naava+smolash&source=bl&ots=vH2JSztKT4&sig=yrl6JKiTcjU9lWYmWbtXn8o3jlA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=umDGT47rL7D16gHVvM3sBg&ved=0CF4Q6AEwCDi2Ag#v=onepage&q=naava%20smolash&f=false

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/university_of_toronto_quarterly/v078/78.2.contributors.html

http://books.google.ca/books?id=BNlncrChYs0C&pg=PA287&lpg=PA287&dq=naava+smolash&source=bl&ots=vH2JSztKX9&sig=Eh7W7iLYxOiNv8Ry4LMB7HIkHKQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=52DGT--nGaSm6gHz3riiBg&ved=0CFkQ6AEwBji4Ag#v=onepage&q=naava%20smolash&f=false

http://www.gmj.uottawa.ca/0902/v2i2_jiwani%20and%20dakroury.pdf

http://www.newstarbooks.com/pdfs/books/9781554200504-Resistance-web.pdf

www.synergiescanada.org/journals/etc/scl

www.westcoastline.ca/blog/?paged=2

muse.jhu.edu/journals/university_of_toronto.../toc/utq.78.2.html

jacket2.org/commentary/poetry-and-activism

journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/download/18927/20723

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=251&ved=0CFAQFjAAOPoB&url=http%3A%2F%2F130.102.44.247%2Fsubject_browse%3Fsubtopic%3DRace%2520relations%2520and%2520the%2520press%2520--%2520Canada.&ei=wV_GT6uGNuWK6QHzx5GeBg&usg=AFQjCNGADp2-5UiRV0gLitxWDfLbx9ATAQ