1. |
Denialist
05:45
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Denialist
Increments
You slept in on the morning of the violence
Woke to a full diagnostic of the incident
Numb to it
Feigned surprise
As a choir of apologists apologize
Well-rehearsed in pretending not to recognize
Those hollow eyes
Unconvinced
By the thin, panicked smile of the revisionist
“We’ll just rewrite the 80s, make it feminist
Non-interventionist”
‘Cause you know that face
From a dream or a memory you can’t quite place
Two round holes that you cut into a pillowcase
The only trace
Phantoms
Desperate to be seen
Dressing up for Halloween a season early
Bite lips
Insist they don’t exist
Cloak ourselves in myths of moderation
The dream begins
You are searching your city for a long lost twin
They are reaching out to you with a phantom limb
Paper thin
Lonely streets
All the ghosts look away before your eyes can meet
You peer out at each other safely underneath
Cold white sheets
Phantoms
Desperate to be seen
Dressing up for Halloween a season early
Breathe deep
Rock ourselves to sleep
In the darkness we repeat this incantation
It’s just an aberration
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2. |
Supremacist
03:56
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Supremacist
In the film
I am played by
A chiselled jawed
Blonde and blue eyed
Everyman
Cool and classless
Pursuant of
A dimpled actress
Feeling bored
And frustrated
Talents unappreciated
But then comes
A shadowed stranger
Says, “you’re destined
Mankind’s saviour!”
In the crowd
We mouth the verses
Close our eyes
Like Sunday Service
Bow our heads
Lift our hands
A movement
With no clear demands
The chorus swells
Asserts a truth
The supremacy of youth
The poetry of indignation
Absent risk or provocation
In the afterglow
Of crisis
Curled around
Our devices
I watch you slip
Into a dream
Your finger still
Upon a screen
The secrets we tell
Our machines
Are whispered back
To us in dreams
And in the dark
We lay defenceless
As desire is turned against us
We speak our love
In the language
Of the supremacist
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3. |
Character Witnessess
02:55
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Character Witnesses
Lionized
Untested and unscrutinized
We claim to love without condition
What if we
Expressed our love as bravery?
Would it still be as freely given?
This is the fear in the pit of your stomach
This is the way you perform it in public
This is what’s offered when help is requested
This is your courage once courage is tested
Measure me
By the trust that I receive
From those I’ve told I’ll stand beside them
Measure what I do
By how much it offers to
Those whose love has been denied them
Here is a lineup of character witnesses
Justice applied in particular instances
Here is the long list of all our excuses
Here’s how they sound when repeated back to us
Here are the names and addresses of monsters
Here are the tools to dismantle their culture
Here is a ledger of where they’re invested
Here is the number to call if arrested
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4. |
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The Best Place I Ever Lived
I was born into this city
Watched it grow up next to me
Barely 30 years
Into its second century
Now construction cranes are clawing back
Another square inch of sky
Can’t remember when my city
Stopped looking me in the eye
Let’s have one last round of drinks
Before they start tearing the building down
Cocktails are infused
With the last traces of Chinatown
Stumble home down side streets
That they tell the tourists to avoid
Streetlights in the puddles
Cut with traces of an opioid
People talk of leaving
Sometimes even I do
All I ever wanted
Was somewhere to belong to
Standing at the bus stop
Hoping for a Number 8
Standing on the sidelines
Hoping markets will self-regulate
Stand before the audience
Take care to acknowledge land
But not that its continued occupation’s
Part of our retirement plan
People talk of leaving
I wonder if we ought to
All I ever wanted
Was somewhere to belong to
It’s too late for the island
Too late for the valley
Studio or bachelor
Two-bedroom, single-family
Wealth as its own virtue
Land as its expression
A generation saves up
Towards its own dispossession
Cindy says she’s leaving
But where she’ll go she isn’t sure
They parcelled up a city block
And sold it out from under her
She says, “I stuck it out and gave this city
Everything I had to give
I’ll remember this apartment
As the best place that I ever lived”
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5. |
Turn This Song Over
05:26
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Turn This Song Over
Turn this song over
Consider its purpose
How much was gifted?
How much was purchased?
The pulse of a culture
Held in your hand
Feels distant as fathers
And their dreams of an unpeopled land
Dream of the future
Relive the past
But here in the moment
Our culture feels
Like we are touching it through glass
So we perform it
Like its imaginary
The backdrop against which
White women marry
Like something we try on
Whenever we want to
Dressed up for the party
One that we were not invited to
Excuse the question
So hard to tell
What’s our intention
Singing songs
The same ones that the racists sing
And some of this feels real
Some of it pretend
A conversation with a man
That you pay to be your friend
Getting close enough to touch
Using a digital zoom
Somehow it always disappoints
Like every photo of the moon
What’s the sound of this music
Unappropriated?
What’s the shape of this country
Repatriated?
Turn this song over
What could it become?
What might it offer
To those that it was stolen from
Dream of the future
Relive the past
But here in the moment
Our culture feels
Like we are touching it through glass
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6. |
Paycheques
03:54
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Paycheques
Getting shit-faced with my brothers
On a sadness there’s no name for
Convinced of our own genius
Like the men that we were named for
Crane our necks to watch the violence
Turn away before the slaughter
Watch the hurricanes approaching
Name the storms after our daughter
Darling there’s a sadness I have seen
One I have been trying to avoid
But keeping down the darkness inside me
Limits my capacity for joy
Always thought I was unworthy
Left to reckon with my failures
Always thought things would be different
Once I untangled my anger
Waited to feel better
Dreamt of the hereafter
To feel the soft touch of a lover
To hear my children bray with laughter
Darling there’s a sadness I have seen
One I have been trying to explain
It’s a place where each of us have been
Still we do not dare to speak its name
Darling there’s a sadness I have seen
One I have been trying to deny
Even as its building by degree
In the spaces between you and I
It’s as if living paycheque to paycheque
Is just a game poor folk like to play
As if there is not enough justice
So some have to give theirs away
As if pleasure is something to save for
A debt to be serviced with pain
We threaten each other with losses
Never ask what we might stand to gain
Halfway down the hallway
Somebody graffitied
A list of good intentions
Numbered them like treaty
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7. |
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Waiting for the Earthquake
The contested territory where our culture sits
Has a nation painted over it
And when we close our eyes we see the shape of it
In our poetry, in our politics
In the prayers that we repeat on anniversaries
At the cenotaphs, in the cemeteries
In the lessons that we learned from the atrocities
For which we were named beneficiaries
Truth stood out on the blockade
Held it for a decade
We pretended not to notice it
And now we populate our platforms
With promises of reform
When the call is for abolishment?
Don’t mistake the way things are
For how they’ve always been
What should we tear down
In the meantime
While we’re waiting
For the earthquake?
The future we were told was preordained for us
Now seems mutable and precarious
Battle lines are drawn and boundaries readjust
Between what feels safe and what’s dangerous
Our city’s built of polished steel and poured concrete
Still it shifts sometimes underneath our feet
As we stumble home along its lonely streets
Past the phantoms cloaked in their thin white sheets
Now that we’ve all seen the violence
Broadcast into the silence
Of a nation under quarantine
Are we surprised that abolition’s
Just the starting position
Towards a reimagining?
Don’t mistake the way things are
For how they’ll always be
What should we tear down
In the meantime
While we’re waiting
For the earthquake?
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Corbin Murdoch Vancouver, British Columbia
Corbin Murdoch is a songwriter who grew up and still lives on the unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. He was a member of The Nautical Miles (2003-2017), with whom he released five albums. ... more
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