Through all the cavities and holes and recesses of your body, swimming through all the veins and spaces between your bones. Up up up through your body, up through your chest, your hollow stomach and drowsy lungs, up through your throat, up past your mouth, your friendly lazy nose, up past your sunken cheeks and missing your empty head and out through your gorgeous pent-up eyes.
Out onto the sidewalk and away.
Past the stores and neighbourhoods and locked-up cars. Winding through all the side streets and garbage-day streets and recycling-day streets. Past all the limping old people, the carriage-pushing rushing mothers, the busy suited sandwiched men, the bright morning light, and down into the town. Whooshing past sewer grates and gutters, cross-walks and all-day shoppers, and up the side of the tall office tower.
Now on the roofs, looking out on all the other roofs and all their from-ground lead-ups. Thoughtless, blind, to the effort it takes for the world to spin enough times to get to this state, the sheer wealth of instinct possessed by all the pieces working together, ignoring all that. Jumping, leaping now, from roof to roof to roof. Smoke from ventilation pipes, gravel from rooftop flooring, car alarms and shouts and sirens all from below. Recycling trucks, coughing, soft breathing all from below. Leaping, higher now, time between landings getting longer. Eventually, soon, cloud cover is broken, and suddenly in the jetstream and taken wherever whenever, completely in control and in new new new new places.
[available May 18th from Constellation]
Posted by Dan at March 6, 2009 2:00 PMabsolutely brilliant writing. I didn't realize how much I missed alden penner until now. =)
thank you.
Posted by Sean at March 6, 2009 4:43 PMbeautiful.
Posted by j at March 8, 2009 12:48 AMBriliant writing...probably if conveying anything about the album under review is of minimal importance. No kidding, I enjoyed reading the paean just as I might love the mellifluous cadences of a language I understood not a word of.
Posted by Norman Dale at March 8, 2009 10:17 AMRemember their first show at Birks that they asked me to tape? Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjS4M_rdM4o&feature=related
Posted by Ian at March 12, 2009 5:18 PM