what we wanted was death-defying: poetry about parkour (updated with an explanation) by risa
Parkour, or Free Running, is a speedy, athletic, and artistic way of moving through (up and over) urban space. Like most things city kids dream up, it has a way of evoking the sense of what’s been lost beneath all this concrete, while at the same time celebrating the strange, hard contours of the space. The poem below was originally written about finding a way down from Mount Royal along the exposed metal struts of a staircase that seemed to have been abandoned on its way to renovation. And it was about how we were filming that, and temping ourselves to more dramatic descents, and then watching and editing the footage later and feeling detached from it. I felt like I needed to convince myself that it all had really been there by going out and finding places to run and clamber through again. Learning about parkour was like wrapping a good word and established practice around something I’d already known: that there could always be more to city movement then herd walking.
We kept our backs to the mangled intervals,
the wounded supports of a once-staircase.
what we wanted instead was death-defying,
a leap down to the road,
not wreckage but the fall
and then the quiet that comes after:
the stillness and laughter made possible,
over time, by the ebb-and-flow of these, our quick wet circuits
the fluctuations in our neural nets
produces both the slipping away
and the clicking, sun-lit and gasping gain:
as seconds leap and scream into existence others,
deep in complex systems, lose their fingerprints.
In the course of a little forgetfulness
minds lose the edge off their frantic spin.
Later, in the editing room
peeling the scene apart with the thin fingers of this transparent tool
I found your face smiling in the space
behind that shadow,
and felt my busy self erased by long thin blades.
I swear I felt us circle in and of life
in the
livewire geometry
of light and code and camera and lens.
we want, so desperately, to see ourselves
in an awareness looking back
everyone has a chapter in their books
on the possibility of artifical intelligence
but there is already other intelligence here
we don’t look these citizens in the face
aware as we are
of the complexity of giving them more than the vote.
did we begin to write robots when we had
forgotten animals?
pushed out to the violent edges of our circuitry
we have them running scared
dedicated to parkour
September 21st, 2007 at 5:01 am
really really good, good luck with training bud