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CHAPTER 1
ALL-NIGHT ARCADE
PROGRESS
Gene-targeting and molecular cloning. The shrine of the genome has been broken into — GloFish the colour of Skittles, or an Apple product line, happily swim in aquariums. Insulin-producing bacteria are grown in large fermentation tanks to provide medicine for diabetics. Frankenfruit are popular at Whole Foods. Grapples. Tangelos. Seedless watermelons. We need to take bioengineering between species to the next level. There are glow-in-the-dark-cats, featherless chickens,
ALL-NIGHT ARCADE
I am playing Galaga in my imagination in the last century where all around me kids packed tighter than bees in a hive labour to master rows of arcade games,
CONFESSIONALISM
Ashbery is a bore. W. is a hack with a rhyming dictionary. M. is the best poet we have. I stole the milk money in grade three. Killed a grizzly bear with a Boy Scout knife. I have no idea how to wear my hair. I won the Boston Marathon.
TRIGGER WARNINGS
A lightning strike kills three hundred reindeer in Norway.
THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT
I hear that song "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"
so when I hear the chorus, I feel only at a distance from the telltale guitar of Johnny Marr or Morrissey's cries.
a requiem to teenage years that never quite existed except in old music videos or the pages of Rolling Stone.
where our memories, mere shadows of sense, emerge on the other side of a train platform in a black-and-white film or like a sweeping beam of light that never goes out
cutting through a fogbank warning ships off rocks,
Our leather jackets with band patches and buttons hang in the closet or attic. We raise our children saying our love is a light that never goes out,
AMPLIFIER
Standing stoop-shouldered, coaxing power chords from an electric guitar, a teen boy catapults sounds out his bedroom window. The neighbourhood one big amphitheatre. With each chord progression, the boy
drifts further away from anxiety and disillusionment.
His guitar's patch-cord umbilicus connects him in utero to heroes like Kurt Cobain and J Mascis.
slowly filters through the trees in his backyard.
his synapses kicked into overdrive, his veins thumping with a finite earthly music he believes has the power to smash the world and reassemble it into something a teenager might finally understand. What is this anyway?
There is the ordinary and there is the sublime although it will be years before he sees life in such terms,
THE HUNDREDS
Eight-tracks of Neil Diamond's Hot August Night are gone.
ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
Most poems I read feel like I'm walking through someone's private zoo. One of those sad-looking affairs with a hand-painted sign just off a highway with a bear in a cage sitting with his back to you,
EMPIRE OF TIME
Past the alpha and omega, past being and becoming, past the Monkees,
and Gwendolyn MacEwen, past CBC and reruns of The Edge of Night,
past determined shoppers digging through racks at BiWay and Woolsworth,
and the omega; past Scout meetings in church basements, past teen dances in school gymnasiums, past the Vietnam War and draft dodgers
opening food co-ops in rural Ontario; past the October Crisis and the Squamish Five, past hippies and free love and DIY communes;
past the white noise of politics, past the eulogizing of prime ministers,
past adolescence, its altar of self-loathing, past Iran-Contra and Chernobyl, past Cabbage Patch dolls and Rubik's Cubes and New Coke,
past virgin Redwood Forests and a plastic-free Sargasso Sea; past Glasnost and Perestroika, past free trade and a factory in every town, past
armies of unionized workers and Halley's Comet, the World Wide Web and Tiananmen Square; past poetry readings, obsessive addictions
to learning — the Cult of Illumination — past late night Montreal falafel shops and the beautiful girl you left crying at a deserted café in the rain; past
the Oklahoma City bombing, royal divorces, past the point of no return, past the Hubble Telescope and the Mars Pathfinder missions,
past neon signs and the grammar of despair; past the Large Hadron Collider and y2k, past closed porno theatres and a corporate Times Square;
past 911 and a handgun in every drawer; past marriages and divorces,
Jacob's corporate ladder, past lies and promises, past our own self-pity and skin wrinkles; past Occupy movements and Arab Springs, past
celebrity memoirs, past faith-science binaries, past planets circling a giant gigawatt nuclear sun, past the alpha and the omega.
COMMUNION
Yesterday, a stranger waved furiously at me until as I drew closer
he realized his mistake disappearing down the road which left me
mulling over all day who he thought I might have been, or if I am
who I am, which is to say are we anyone at all beyond a lingering shadow
hiding inside ourselves waiting for strangers to wave so we might wave back.
REALITY CHECK
Checking one, two, three. Is this thing on?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Chris Banks.
Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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