Needs Improvement Read online

  Copyright © Jon Paul Fiorentino, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyright material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author's rights.

  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.