Soggy Composition
Storymaking across poetry, prose & photography on Toronto streets.
Biking from downtown Toronto to my new apartment on the east end, I passed this disintegrating building regularly on Adelaide Street East. I think it was a school because when the stairwell was cut open I could see children’s paintings in the stairwell. This was a familiar sight to another school’s stairwell mural that I saw exposed during a demolition in 2020.
Of course, the building was not disintegrating on its own.
Here is puddle and rubble from the site of another school-turned-construction site, this time near Bloor and Dufferin.
What city razes its own schools?
I consider . . . How soon a community gets built.
Is a community ever really built? demolished?
razed?
There is a story somewhere here about signs.
I see them on my walk to the Stockyards.
Here, we notice dried drops of water and small specks of dust on the image. While imperfect, they elaborate its realness.
It feels. Real.
Electricity is real. I am scared to feel it, although I have it in me. Although it is mine.
There is a story somewhere here about circuits and bodies.
I stop to consider the community of grasses making a way through concrete. What about the spores strapped to the bottom of that truck? Will this community decompose, too? When is the inevitability of its own soggy decomposition?
At last,
All signs point here.
All photos Ilford HP5 on Nikon N70, developed by myself at Gallery 44 (Toronto).