The Sneaker Imprint City
a poem by L. Chrystal Dmitrovic
Conduct a sneaker imprint city
Pull the cord for the first stop
Melt into your seat
And crunch
Some popcorn beneath your heel
Pace the bas relief carefully
Study the indent of time
From footstep to first step
From succession to expression
Crossing eventually street car tracks
An ancient bobby pin
Beside sewer steel
Rusted into clock hands and
Stuck quick like contact cement
In bubble gum
Lift your leg, stare at ground
Buildings whirling round and round
Woven dogmas fly, unravel out of grasp
Curling wails fade ghosts behind
And last patterned lines dissolve
The giant sneaker, laces dangling
Powerful and downward,
Stamps and crushes and creates
One instance only
Once…
For the spans of an imprint
Original version Copyright © 1972 Lorraine Chrystal Dmitrovic
(The original version of “The Sneaker Imprint City” was published in the early 1970s in Abacus, the official newspaper of Victoria Park Secondary School in North York, Ontario, Canada)
Revised version Copyright © 2006 Lorraine Chrystal Dmitrovic
Published by empressbookswp
“I am a writer foremost, and an artisan painter and jeweller living in Roseneath, Ontario, Canada. Formerly a journalist from and born in Toronto, I have lived in beautiful Northumberland County for over 25 years.
“My artist’s statement:
If you are an artisan, day is night and night is day. You forget to eat. You sometimes force yourself to make time for your family and friends. Your blank canvas or page before you demands the closest of relationships and can be a jealous lover. The paint on your brush or fingers, the keyboard, is the medicine that heals you, and heals others through your visions when they look at your completed works. You look in the mirror and you can only see an artist at work always. If not painting or writing, your subconscious is absorbing your environment and your mindset for your next brush to canvas outing or the next word to emerge. If we sleep, our arts will wake us up and draw us magnetically to the creative pleasures and discoveries of the day. We are alive because we are creating out of ourselves and putting ourselves on the canvas or the printed page. We perceive our surroundings and exhale magic ….”
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