Installment 41 fuses “Car Poems” and “Anti-Genre” through its collisions of the natural and urban, human and technological, lyric and anti-lyric. These texts by Adrienne Adams are disjointed, jarring, yet strangely choate.
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Hatred Blanks
Hatred blanks you out and you can think of nothing but spit. The city still shines despite all our
efforts to regurgitate its venom. Wisdom is a sickness that grows inside your head when you sit
down in the grey. Down, past the pavements decorating the earth in armour is a song. It has been
singing your name since life was born. Even in the sewers, it flows it’s everlasting melody. You
can say you hate me, that you don’t know me, that we have never been friends; but I know the
roots that find truth even in the darkest of places, and right now I am simply sick or turning
yellow into red. So much energy expended on a no. Brainers turned to yes around the corner of
terday. I hopscotch all the stones you try to throw my way. Walk away, walk away, walk away
now. You’ll miss my song when I’m gone. And one day when you hit the pavement of your own
stop signs, you’ll realize the song of the world is not mine, is not yours. And yet we sing. For life
connects us to everything in the vibration of its hum if we let it strike all the cords within us and
breaks us whole, open; exposed. A river runs through it. You are the river and I am it’s song. I
am the water and have been here all along. Every connected drop different, dispersed, and
flashed together. The city, the city sings its songs. All. Day. Long. The city made of us, made us.
The home we build inside of life. Don’t hate your protector or your protection. Recognize a
bandage when you see it. I’m tired. Go touch trees, more often.
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Rusty Blinks
The rust car lights blink tiger lilies while leafmen crawl up their lids. Blink, blink. Tinker Bell is
wavering existence as we examine; rods or cones? Transform or echoe? Particle or wave?
Twinkle, twinkle little star abandoned the Ford in the ditch of movie star dreams. Once, my Baba
sat in this seat. Glenbow ranched a museum, not just cattle grown fields along the river banks of
Cochrane. Mountains ache over arching molds. It takes so much to break our genealogical
Matryoshka eggs. Patterns are bound to repeat. Time spirals. It’s taken me an age to realize
people in history were just as lively as us. Their affairs echoed technicolour emotions, not the
static of black and white loves. Blink, blink. The formality of Dickinson posing; hiding secret
illnesses. Then wild thighs drove the Chevy’s of America through the field of our dreams.
I’ve retired; my metal disintegrating to dust.
We think technology is unnatural but we are as part and parcel of mother earth invented refined,
reforged metal and steam. Drilled engines dig up ore settled eons ago in the bedrock that buried
Atlantis from existence, but not memory. The blood of the earth fuels our skimming flights.
Modern heights risen from ancient depths. We invented every technological thing in the
naturalness of our brains. Sometimes I think progress is hate but this engine knows that its
disintegration, feeds.
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Photo © Adrienne Adams
