Occlusion Walk through a built environment by any route. Count how many steps it takes to clear each building along the route. You may count your own steps or someone else's steps. Either way, start counting steps when your body aligns with the closest edge of the building and end off counting as your first extremity clears the building's furthest edge. Each building will be a line of text and the number of steps to cross its mass will be the number of syllables in that line. The text, be it poetic or prosaic or a mixture of both, must describe the building and its immediate surroundings. Include moving elements in the text including yourself as you take the steps. The process of describing a place will, in this way, be filtered through its own mass and presence, producing a text with a size a shape to match, a rhythmic and structural forms will show through. V1: counting my steps: Route: From Pizza Fresca to the edge of the bank, going east Eight buildings Step count: 5, 6, 5, 11, 11, 18, 18, 25 So: One Block, At Pace White stained façade A restaurant, two more Salt crunches beside Others: all-black backpack, puff jacket shopping Trying to remember the steps taken past Five, six, five, five; no; stop, five, six, five, eleven, eleven, no, five, six Petering off into the distance at the parking lot where there's a break Pale blue fencing cordons off a construction site behind where there once was a bar-hotel-bar grouping V2: another person's pace Scope: from the new res to the main intersection Four buildings Steps: 7, 10, 11, 22 So: Half-Block, Another Pace The computer shop: open It's still open but no one is browsing The figure past two eating in the window The streetcar approaches as announced by the two green lights beside the route number placard