Copyright © Jon Paul Fiorentino, 2013
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Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fiorentino, Jon Paul
Needs Improvement / Jon Paul Fiorentino – First edition.
Poems.
eISBN 978-1-77056-357-5
I. Title.
PS8561.I585N43 2013 C811’.6 C2013-904097-8
Neither the Austinian promise nor the Althusserian prayer require a pre-existing mental state to ‘perform’ in the way that they do.
– Judith Butler
Dedicated to the memory of Robert Kroetsch
THINGS-AS-FACTS
The flesh-splashed summer risk
the long-glare congestion guarantee
the inadequacy of the what-you-knows
the unwelcome breeze, the calming allergens
There are parks and buildings and transport
and then there's your tacit asyndeton:
you remove, you revise, you mute
you want to tell me things you never will
First, you had it in your mind to construct
a rubric, a gift, a translation tool
that would allow us to present things-as-facts
you couldn't find the language
But, with your latest, defeatist polysyndeton,
you found a way to dream
and design and compose
the most pressing need for it
IN PERFECT WINNIPEG
In ill nauset I messaged you
In old Montreal I invoked you
In dead Winnipeg I owned you
I am wrong again
You should heed the words
of your last, last manager
(whatever those were)
In dreary Vancouver I exorcised you
In ruddy Brooklyn I remade you
In perfect Winnipeg I rewrote you
I am wrong again
LOWERHAND
String prose units, inversions
all the way to rural
Find ways to unthread then stitch up then
consummate lexical decoration then trash it
Your sleeve, your heart, your sleep, your spleen
Prepare existential theses in medias res
or support local load-bearing relics
Let the winter do its kind work so
steal an almost-vintage jacket
Your layers, your work, your laugh, your use
Ensure your phrases enforce
tenets of exuberance
Don't alter a thing
gain the lowerhand
Your head, your case, your tense
you're strong
HEY, CAROL MAKER
How is your daughter?
Do you still
live in Wolseley?
Do you still
have some issues?
Did they give
you that settlement?
Did it pay off
your mortgage?
Are you still
unemployed?
Are you still
unemployable?
She writes:
I've never had imposter syndrome
because everyone has always had it for me.
And whenever anyone says, ‘I love you,’
I say, ‘No, you are.’
HAPPENS
A file break undertow
wishes coma parallel
Phone call collection
agent misery and mulch
Brine dreg cellophane
never-hooded suicide on hold
Common paraplectic sorry
ruin and rune comma apology
I’m too old it happens
it happens
MINIMAL PAIR: SIMPLETONS
When I said we made a minimal pair
I was deep in linguistic conceit
It had nothing to do with your character
it was strictly labio-dental
LONGSLIDE
189 Allenby Crescent –
swollen breath, gravel
chase me back there, boys
Or recess –
hide under the large slide, descend
above me, girls
Eight-track stereo –
croon dylan’s Christianest album
all shag-carpet orchestral
Some basement –
pucks shot with splintered sticks
battered washer/dryer
Vocational high school –
chase Father’s white rum with Mother’s
diet soda
The perfectly good air –
choke on it
settle for being the perfectly bad son
Now –
the long slide,
the trickle-down dying
WINNIPEG COLD STORAGE COMPANY
When we hate to have been excited by Winnipeg, what kind of hate do we make? We ascribe an agency to Winnipeg, a power to excite, and position ourselves as the objects of its excitable geography. We hate that Winnipeg acts, and acts against us, and the hate we make is a further instance of Winnipeg, one that seeks to arrest the metonymy of the prior placing. Thus, we exercise the metonymy of Winnipeg even as we seek to counter its metonymy, caught up in a bind that no act of storage can undo.
The title of ‘The Winnipeg Cold Storage Company’ poses the question of collective memory and what it means to say that ‘things might be done with storage.’ The problem of collective memory is thus immediately bound up with a question of performance. What does it mean for storage not only to store, but also in some sense to perform and, in particular, to perform what it stores?
Recent proposals to regulate Winnipeg myth on site, in the facility, and in other similar facilities, have spawned a set of ambivalent cultural consequences. The spectre of regionalism has become a privileged haunting in which to re-evaluate the cause and effects of civic shame.
The question of whether citizenship requires the repression of Winnipeg is not new, but the recent efforts to regulate the self-storage of citizenship within Winnipeg repose this question in a different light. After all, Winnipeggers enjoy some of the rights and obligations of citizenship, but not all of them.
To argue that certain archives of Winnipeg are more properly construed as identity rather than history sidesteps the question of storage. storage now appears to be the repression of citizenship, and if Winnipeg or pornography or the mayor’s office or cold are no longer accepted as ‘history’ then the repression of any of those customs would no longer appear to be Winnipeg.
TRINITY BELLWOODS
Down to my last
lyric
Do you know the word pilling?
It’s a piling on of fabrications
You wear it well or
wore it
Free-range derangement commences
as denizens make strange with tenses and moods
I saw an old cancerous friend here
who said, ‘I remember when i used to be creative –
They cut it out of me
all interstitial-like’
Now, the lies and years are
piling/pilling
I will miss you when you shun me. I write these
things for nothing
You remain
the best nothing I know
A SLOW, STUPID METRONOME
With decades behind, one still boorishly chases the dull candles held by those somehow traipsing through the uncomplicated life; one just an acknowledgements page away from calling it now, one page away from done. Over it. so very over it. With a brisk rendering of complexity, shrill and shrugged repeats of days, and one is an unparented swiller and one’s tonic and balm no longer enough. soon there will be no verb. The countables wreck their own units; static laughs, lit up and tweak-weary. diplomacy taints the micropolitic. Countless hours, of course, spark sluggish decades and one loses games one isn’t even aware of. There is this one thing that all things are made of, one says, and the dull-witted say, ‘yes, this.’ One does not, should not. still rhetoric eases. The peculiar sting of fact-unchecked quirkfactor hymnals and yet one chases slow-moving candles and one fattens and withers in season – slow metronome. A slow, stupid metronome. Then, at some point, there is no real verb but an unrelenting need to call it and to call it in time, listlessly, to call one’s own over it.
IT STILL MEANS FUCK ALL TO ME
Write of the solitary fence post
of the day you heard the incantatory wisdom of birds of Alberta
and how the peculiar birdsong of the tundra swan once set your
spirit free
Write of the struggles of your fathers
of the linguistic imperatives that shackle you and keep you from
articulating the particularities of non-heteronormative and
alternative identities
Write of the land and how it’s shaped you
of the small things like the footsteps you hear when you wish
to hear nothing and the incomprehensible strangeness of being
and exactly what you have gleaned
Write of the day that you lost her
of the day that you lost him and everything collapsed into
emblems and metaphors and similes and other tropes blending
into the cruellest and sharpest unit of metonomy
Write of the city that you left there
of the Winnipeg half-jokes, the myth-making memos, the spray
paint and solvents, the cult of new money, the rebuild and letdown,
the angst of personae, the collective of lonely
THE CRUELLEST THINGS
Let jargon
let twinning
Find frail ones
find, kill them
Execute without extremities
execute with outsourcing
Precision in the playlist
precision – the oldest dreck in the book
Couplets are unkind
couplets
COME BACK
No such thing as comebacks. Treacle
soon-to-be
When that happens
you will know the reasons
Because the reasons are the things –
mistakes, sight gags, people you’ve hurt
Now on a loop ordered from least
to most malignant
A score. Let’s just
call it that when it begins again
INCALCULABLE
The most impressive diarist –
such a meagre diary
One million documentaries
such unkind documentation
A torrent of confessionals –
a gush and the land is yours
Infinite eulogies
you know the elective logic here –
You made it and
you slay it every time
IT IS OKAY AND IT’S OK
If you bandy about protocols for the dance card; it is okay and it’s ok to speak in clear sentences even though there isn’t a dance (there never will be)
You may propose and propose. Let us be clear and let’s be precise. Your purpose of things is borne out of exalted forecasts, broadcasts
The broadcasts diminish in real time as we diminish slightly faster. It is okay to speak in clear sentences and it’s ok to say a thing before the broadcast’s end
It is sooner than you applied for. The quickened wretched hubris calms you – an HDMI swaddling. The thing is, it is okay. it’s ok to speak in a clear sentence or to even
Risk more than one. It’s okay and it’s ok to not let the terrible, accurate tune pass you by; it is okay and it’s ok to feel alone and Dopplered. That is what it does and that’s what
Totally okay to have lost it in the process of nothing other than losing. Totally and it is okay. it’s ok. I promise. Although these things called promises never quite exist. I promise
HOW WISE YOU MUST BE BY NOW
This testament seems perfect
so perfect so right – is it new?
So obvious entirely oblivious that our
distance is orchestral, choleric
You’re in rim-shot pratfall proximity
control this sanguine scatter
Suck the chloroform choir dry –
revisionist hymnal tablets touch
The song lies and you knew it
but that’s the thing about aging –
Some songs might
WICKED ELOQUENT
Because poetry is very, very far from –
and those who therefore thrive insist it remain so
And also contemplative drones drone
inside cabalist cocooneries
Not to mention domain names reserved for only the most
wicked eloquent –
Plus flaccid fraternities with their
heightened-flaccidity-as-aesthetic-mandate flail, swing
Most meritorious solder wand weld torch trophy crooners
croon the comments, the walls, avoid the wells
And wasn’t this ambition supposed to be in the writing, not in its
product? In tenor and vehicle and not in laurel and mantle?
Fuck me. I’m as flail as anyone
SKULK HOUR
All love is careless
bleating sadly into some thing or other or
mainlining its way into varicose
The millionaires of summer
swelter away in Old Montreal
delve deep into marry me’s
I’m scared all the way
down the skill hull
it’s always a point of almost-pride
No setting to this poem
but your mind’s all right
and the pediatricians are sleeping
so just skulk softly
LIVE STREAM
Live stream
Nothing here
but anchors
Home never lasts, outlasts
there are windows walls ceilings
broken bottles respirator floors
dialysis terrace instant messaging
machines and mescaline fails
I’ve been alone and I like it –
collectivity of nouns running
vacant – city hall unencumbered
one incumbent in the mix splitting
sides taking names for day surgery
It’s never felt more like
homing beacon dirge drop the shadows
on the porcelain orange surge the long
way make it stick pray to something smaller
than myself go to hell make it humour
GAG
Entirely my idea
not a great one but entirely mine
There was a bicycle and an objectivist poet
sort of riding it
Not red or blue
entirely my idea all twig and spoke and gag
I gag often these days like as if it w
ouldn’t catch up
never my bicycle always entirely my idea
And i share the poet with a post-mountain
time scholar from out east
Grey
not silver but entirely grey
PANTONE 185C
There is a mostly red, cylindrical ashtray. Right there. On a picnic table. Concentrate. It is mostly empty. You will notice there is one half-smoked cigarette in it. A Viceroy. The red ashtray on the picnic table is in the park and so are you.
Does the ashtray belong to someone? No. It did but it doesn’t. What kind of red is it? You donet know the name for it yet. It’s similar to what’s left of the red on your nails. You tell yourself Pantone 185C. It is Pantone 185C.
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