Author: gabrielsmy

Don’t cry for me Vancouver

This is not us
Born and bred in Vancouver
Remember this, the morning after

Why did you trash my downtown backyard?
Such a beautiful city
Destroyed by such a few

Shame shame, double shame
Where does this anger and hate come from?
A riot in the city of love

We are so much more than this
These are not the fans we need or deserve
I wish we could have been better

When you talk about destruction
You know you can count me out
You will pay, somewhere, somehow

The city belongs to us
The people whose words are on the walls
I am proud to walk around the morning after

And see everybody clean
What a few people destroyed
Love can save us, only love

Vancouver sigue de pie
Te amo hermosa cuidad
Better luck next year boys

A compilation of phrases written spontaneously on window boarding by Vancouverites cleaning up after the Stanley cup riot, 15 June 2011.

The Sample

I want a specimen of your urine.
I have my own syringe.

I had a suckling brother,
who died at the most tender age.
The beast had a human body,
the feet of a buck, and
a horn on its head.
The corpse will be taken to Tonga.

Because I was out buying a pair of wooden shoes,
I had yams and fish for two days,
and then I ate fern roots.
At what time were these branches
eaten by the rhinoceros?

I don’t play the violin, but I love cheese.

Useless phrases drawn from actual phrasebooks by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall from Limits of Language, 2006.

Full of dead men’s bones

All your talk
about freedom and democracy
is sheer claptrap,
parrot phrases,
fashionable twaddle,
or hypocrisy.
It is just a painted signboard.

And you yourselves are
whited sepulchres. You
are mean-spirited boors,
and your education, culture,
and enlightenment are
only a species of
thoroughgoing prostitution.

A quotation from Lenin’s Collected Works, found at Stalin’s Moustache. By Marika Rose.

Hamlet R.I.P.

Hamlet was a young man very nervous.
He was always dressed in black because his
uncle had killed his father, shooting him
in his ear. He could not go to the
theatre because his father was dead
so he had the actors come to his house
and play in the front parlor and he learned
them to say the words because he thought he
knew best how to say them. And then he thought
he’d kill the king but he didn’t. Hamlet
liked Ophelia. He thought she was a
very nice girl but didn’t marry her
because she was going to be a nunnery.
Hamlet went to England but he did not
like it very much so he came home. Then
he jumped into Ophelia’s grave and
fought a duel with her brother. Then he died.

From English as She Is Taught: Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools, 1887.

The devil in its sights

It is, frankly, an amazing story.
The indomitable patriarch who will shortly
be forced to plead age and infirmity;

his headstrong son whose eagerness
to do what his father would have done
will shortly doom him;

the loyalists who will unquestionably fall
on their swords; an upending of the moral
landscape in which the miscreants once

happily functioned; and the virtuous newspaper,
perhaps the last great newspaper,
with a last great editor, who, long waiting

for and never believing it would get
such an opportunity, now has
the devil in its sights.

From Will the Guardian Bring Down Rupert Murdoch. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

The Remaining Robot

The remaining robot continues to walk
but eventually also gives up.

He falls to his knees and tries
to reach the buttons
on his own back,
but to no avail.

Instead, he removes his helmet
and reveals a printed circuit board face.
He repeatedly slams the helmet onto the ground
until it is shattered.

Using one of the shards
as a burning-glass,
he focuses the sunlight
to set his hand ablaze.

The film ends
showing the robot,
completely on fire,
walking in slow motion
through darkness.

Part of Daft Punk’s 2006 Electroma DVD summary. Submitted by Jason Davies.