Dear Common: Vancouver "I choose to BELIEVE IN THE NATURAL CONSCIOUSNESS, I SEE WHAT THE DEER SEE" --George Oppen Dear common in Vancouver we slip amongst money coast mists and lumber memories wondering if rain falls equally upon the heads of the rich and poor no noblesse for this oblige as companies mine death to deliver largesse but--city of sightlines and sea walls--where can I lay my natural consciousness here my animal spirits unleashed into the waters of the streams corralled in culverts beneath nonexistent paving stones? Rhetoric is a glass font a chromed entrance to banks and soaring offices my language is simple and inert I might turn to the sentence as a prison or an escape dire predictions stop nothing the arteries fill tunnels and bridges with unbarricaded traffic a flash mob is one thing the way the mountains shoulder their load of snows is another no Atlas no Olympus but to see what the deer see is a revolution of another kind * Dear apparatus of accumulation you platform for capital we call home there are demonstrations and we demonstrate police wear yellow reflective vests and some of us have reflective vests too directing traffic to other ends no monetary reasons in mind like I could love another-- seems almost ontological--the lift of their limbs or voice raised no this no that and affirmation is the sound we make individually though somehow the same spatially and temporally united--you know whose streets our streets * Vancouver is not a march or an occupation but it seems so in its fixity where we''d unleash all this movement course together but work on smoothing the edges where one breaks off and another begins I know I''m just catching up but they spilt this city over indigenous land mountain spirits down to the midden heaped beaches something primitive say commerce or colonization the blunt heads of culture driving stakes until damn I kick my juice if rhyme was a drug I''d sell it by the gram Vancouver you light between mountains and a sea where derricks crane and condos never cease to amaze * Dear common a city is no essence but this conversation this call is something close though it''s tricky to see clearly when even the cops ride bikes and green things become a market of seeming values so boxed voices say what are you protesting against the lap of luxury and medicinally planned peace or is it just your profession to be in the street all these signs and bullhorns in your basement just waiting for a cause some predictable riot against government''s disdain? Dear effects of tireless treason the social only shuffles if you move your feet we''ve learned this in a place invaders called Vancouver even if we are only a few and even if it rains on the day of the demo * Dear common it''s not that we don''t love our city it''s that our city is more than an accumulation of real estates or pile up of colonial collisions on an unmarked historical highway bleeding resources into chemical seas You see-- as lights dimmed over the DTES and tents went up in a vacant lot where developers dreamed of condos sleek in their reflective skins-- who could tell just how far we were from a nineteenth century Paris we build and unwittingly rebuild in our radical minds? I''ll tell you next time we stream into the city celebratory and decked in red--it will be for no hockey game no civic of national spectacle but the ghosts of solidarities past grabbing a hold of the material city stone by shaking stone to heave it into the sea or onto a raven''s sleek back * If this weren''t a poem I would want to talk of protests of marches in these streets the force of voices and flags a group singing loudly a group carrying what looks like a dragon a group with masks and a makeshift battering ram I would want to say Paris say revolution say Paris and Vancouver touch known and unknown but it is not true and we go on ignorant of the we we have been becoming so long they say so long to all that anger and dissent so long we are government and you have nothing to do with us but we''ve everything to do with you so long Paris hello Vancouver Hold on hold on I say I ask have we arrived yet have we begun or even returned from having begun once before hold on hold on Brigette DePape on the senate floor with your sign stop Harper stop Louis-Napoleon we are coming or we have been or we are on our way back from a Paris in our barricaded hearts * Vancouver I''ve seen you on the day of a protest stream along streets to work or between appointments or yoga or shopping in your various hotnesses ignoring us and the noise we make the colour of our banners or the precise words we''ve printed there or which we chant the normal of banks and starbucks and boutiques oblivious to the rain and the gulls or pigeons hunched above trolley wires And I was frightened by the grey stone of your milled eyes the crystal of camera lenses sound of a band or game at the stadium and I ran with these strangled others towards an endless line of cops or some large vacant parking lot late with nothing and no one there just a lone and thin bear eating garbage or an orca gasping on the pavement having burst from the ground [ ].