We don’t often do this on here, but I wanted to share with you a recent poem by Vincent Tinguely, a long-standing ally and friend. It beautifully captures where my heart and mind are at these slow, wintery, Montréal days…

ONE

The swing dance of
The car plants
Bodies interpose themselves
Between arc welded parts
Crashing crushing
Crescendos of consciousness
Swinging through feverish
Interlocking machinery

Electronics and tooled machine parts
Send signals in syncopation
Audience receives the shock wave
And dances

Pyramid schemes
Men at the top
Control a few men who
Control a few more men who
Control a few more men who
Control a few more men who
Know nothing but what they are told

So they invade your country
Or they break your arm
With a police baton

Something in me wouldn’t click
The grain of sand in the gears
Never pulling my weight
I could never fit
In the clack clack machine racket
Flowing through
Work and
War

TWO

It’s too easy to destroy the world
It’s too hard to save it
It’s uphill all the way
When you don’t have a car
When you don’t have that
Prosthesis
Mechanism
Armour

The warning signs
Melted glaciers, torrents, droughts
Still too subtle for clownlike primates
Busy driving their toy cars in their toy towns

Mine mine own –
Like fat men
In a famine

The winners
Can no longer win
If the winners
Want to continue
To live

What impossible dream
Could change this picture?
What IDEAL could sway them
From the consumerist delusion
What better illusion,
What finer dream?

THREE

In the night which you don’t perceive, being of it
What is the crack without the addict?
What is the addict without the need?
It’s all one, the drug, the drugger,
Desire and object
Supply and demand,
We’re stupid algebra –
Illiterate so the mathematicians
Can manipulate us like
So many unknown quantities –
x, y, z

Shoulder to the wheel,
Nose to the grindstone,
How do people actually enjoy themselves, anyhow?
Like there’s sun and green fields and trees
But it is the rest that matters,
Wherever, whenever
The being able to be at rest
The being able to just be
Letting thoughts come and go –
I know you can do that, little Buddha
I have seen with mine own eyes
As you raised a lotus,
And spoke with glowing eyes
And smile and shrug
Of its beauty

FOUR

Oh you want to hear about desire
My desire for this thing to be shaken into a billion shards
An earthquake that runs through the internet
A hurricane that moves through circulating currency
My teeth in your throat, do you hear?
My teeth tearing out your throat

As my mind writhes
Like a python
Lashes like a live wire
Smoking sputtering
Sparking in a
Filthy puddle

God I wish I could just
Wreck it wreck everything
My cock gets hard
Just thinking of it

The darkness I feel coming
Like the advent of winter
Like the fall of night, swift
That darkness of vision

The bored, dead man
Frozen in front of a screen
Waiting waiting waiting
For something, anything
To happen

FIVE

If you look at
it, if you observe
the structure

Just there

At the point where
truth ran up
against the
supposed exigencies
of power

From that point
You can see
A flaw

It runs through
everything from
that point

Through every level
beyond that point
like a fissure
like a hairline
fracture

Spreading wider
in ripples, throughout
everywhere

And that is why
this thing can’t
be ‘fixed’

It has to be
torn down and
rebuilt

SIX

Tides and sunlight
Birds and the patterns birds make
Leaves, the way they move in the wind
Grass and trees forming islands of coolness
Skunks, racoons, squirrels, and rats
The rain
The kiss of air
Bite of cold
Clang of heat
Even in the city I am with you

Bird of prey
Her black wings arch as she
Gazes with a predator’s gaze
Into my eyes

Ragamuffin
I look back at you
With the glazed eye of mortality
Still and calm as a lake at dawn
Everywhere I turn now
Death, death, death
My own death, the death of these times
The dead weight of our stasis

Eternity eyes
Seeking some map, some
Sunshine on the ink blot
The socked-in closet
That life can clamp
Down to

Nothing’s concrete
It’s all flowing
Like a world of melting
Tiger stripe ice cream
Days and nights
Blood in veins
Tears
Air moves in oceans
Over frozen plateaux
Ocean flows
And mind,
Words / images / feelings
Peace my darling
It’s all peace
From the vantage point
Of the nearest star
(Light flows
Across silent space
So cold and old)
And up close
No control
Just eternal flow

SEVEN

Help people
Be with people
Love people

Originally posted on Illimitable Reality Wreck.