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4.43 AVERAGE
4.43 AVERAGE
I cannot stress this enough, I would pay to read Billy Ray Belcourt’s grocery lists. His words are so desperately needed in this world, and I’m so grateful to be around to read them.
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“People love being alive so much
they will force aliveness
onto even a hypothesis of a man.
I am a man,
but only insofar as I spontaneously combust when the best possible world begins.
So, each night I make love
the way one siphons gasoline
from an abandoned car:
as though I am running out of time.
Truth is, I want even less
than this already puny life.”
“It is comforting to think of my gender as a farmer's field already rototilled, already tidied up.
I become less of who I am by the second.”
“We bathed in the acoustics of desire, in the density of a social music that wasn't the noise of the extraordinary. It went on like this for a few months: I was a metaphor he felt stomached by. Tripped up on the ecstasy of fragility, we nested into a debt we knew we couldn't shoulder on our own. No one could see what was there, so what was there was ours. Maybe my propensity for utopian thinking is positively correlated with the agony of being in a world poisonous for those who knowingly reside in the shadows of the not-yet. Maybe it is a coping mechanism. So what?”
“My tongue is a parking garage; men arrived with deflated tires.
What distinguishes denotation from detonation, after all, is human invention. Blood-letting a people with the alphabet is a gutting just the same.
One can't rule out the possibility of violence as a response to violence. Indeed, comprehension is kick-started by a seizure of visual information.
I ask questions that frustrate answerability. This is a form of violence. I pit language against itself and want nothing clean to come of it. This too is a form of violence.
All this talk of how poetry brings us closer to language, but what if its already left? Found a gentler species? Warmer mouths?”
———————————————————————————
“People love being alive so much
they will force aliveness
onto even a hypothesis of a man.
I am a man,
but only insofar as I spontaneously combust when the best possible world begins.
So, each night I make love
the way one siphons gasoline
from an abandoned car:
as though I am running out of time.
Truth is, I want even less
than this already puny life.”
“It is comforting to think of my gender as a farmer's field already rototilled, already tidied up.
I become less of who I am by the second.”
“We bathed in the acoustics of desire, in the density of a social music that wasn't the noise of the extraordinary. It went on like this for a few months: I was a metaphor he felt stomached by. Tripped up on the ecstasy of fragility, we nested into a debt we knew we couldn't shoulder on our own. No one could see what was there, so what was there was ours. Maybe my propensity for utopian thinking is positively correlated with the agony of being in a world poisonous for those who knowingly reside in the shadows of the not-yet. Maybe it is a coping mechanism. So what?”
“My tongue is a parking garage; men arrived with deflated tires.
What distinguishes denotation from detonation, after all, is human invention. Blood-letting a people with the alphabet is a gutting just the same.
One can't rule out the possibility of violence as a response to violence. Indeed, comprehension is kick-started by a seizure of visual information.
I ask questions that frustrate answerability. This is a form of violence. I pit language against itself and want nothing clean to come of it. This too is a form of violence.
All this talk of how poetry brings us closer to language, but what if its already left? Found a gentler species? Warmer mouths?”
“Power, however mundane, is never minuscule.” - Canadian Horror Story, Billy-Ray Belcourt
Liked this a lot but also felt like a lot of it was way over my head. Hard to express.
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
this poetry is just so beautiful, i love the way billy-ray belcourt chooses his words and the stories he tells <3 i also realized that he teaches creative writing at UBC?? so i’m going to go and tell him i love his poetry hehe
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
reflective
slow-paced
