I am resonant with lyric...

I am resonant with lyric,

resounding with chorus and verse.

Oratorios of innocence modulating memories;

I am still being raised

in the shadows of my mother’s anguish, long

returned from the asylum of 9-99 Queen, post-partum,

she was – and remains – a gentle soul under siege:

my childhood among the uncertainties

of her pharmaceutically-induced fugue states,

was attuned to the ranges of her smile,

to her fierce, subdued musings,

to her instrumental jazz records

played across decades.

I am trust-wounds

trapped in echo-chambers of blame;

grown within discords of love and desire

as taught to my father as a boy; he then to me.

Never daring questions, not then,

only later learning that his young aunts

were the erotic mentors

of the confusions that consumed us.

Who them?

A generational tale shaping the context

of his eventual, AA-amends.

I still hear the steel ring of a sword

pulled from the stone of my skull,

a clang of defiance casting

spells chanted from lower bunk dreams

unlocking inchoate moans

while seeking family grails

before the machinations of darkness

were vanquished.

I am litanies of self-nurtured injuries, an aging boy

crowding the intimacy of others,

not to be trusted crooning truth to flowers.

I am madrigal perspectives of flattened hopes.

I am symphonies of loons between lakes,

a mourner of sinking Titanics and crying Kumbayas;

alert to embers of decades-before welfare camps,

sparks of fireburst followed starward in smoke waft.

I am catwalks through marshes,

spikes nailed through cedar onto boles

rough decking wetland paths through woods;

in love with that time, that place and that task.

I remain embarrassment

easing over Tuck Shop poverty;

surviving kindnesses in Woodgreen memories.

I am the harmonies of Peter, Paul and Mary

crossing railway tracks beyond East Lyn Park;

backyard fences spilling raked-leaf decades

over the shoulders of Small’s Creek, onto

household-dumps landlocked between streets;

rivulets vanishing into culverts under Coxwell.

Supervised by the chuckings of chipmunks and squirrels,

I am the corps of us travelling urban ravine banks,

hopping down mud-embedded tires,

footwork on stones above ripples of ooze and freshets:

I am soakers in missteps making for the Lake

back in the days

of smelt die-offs beached on wave-wash,

wading deeper into rollers

breaking free of dead smelts

effervescent

as my brother, sister and I swim beyond the dead-line

on forays from Balmy to the Scarborough Bluffs.

I teeny-bopped my way through the late-Sixties,

May Festival choir boy transposing Beatlemania

onto Ed Sullivan Sundays.

I am the 33 and 1/3 spins

of Tommy Machem reciting O’Driscoll’s dream

of pipers scattering cards and out of it

still waking to wild ducks and drakes;

to the drifting smoke of old men,

to the drift of Yeats across a drear Hart Lake

longing for Brigid and her long, dim hair ever since.

I am inhalations of smog-yellowed airs

over-baked by summers in hot cities;

I remain breaths of harbour crossings

on the upper deck of the Sam McBride

enroute to Ward's Island;

I am exhalations from canoes whispering white pine scents

over Canadian Shield waters.

I am self-exiled from hearth and home in the Seventies,

hitch-hiking a land of snow and Acadian driftwood.

I am survival sustained by the insights of folkloric giants

transforming heart depths and headlands around me:

walking soundscapes of borderless beauty,

wind-whistling melodies of wave-forming dunes.

I am an escapee from – and to – small town gulps of time,

lungs filled for my way back to a city of horns,

to rendezvous with streetcar-wheels curving tracks to squeal

while midnight drunks tinkle urination scales onto piano boxes.

Mangled couplets are howled by Moloch

above the first underground PATH to elevator-muzak.

I am he who has seen

the stone Phoenician heads and walkways

on the roof of the old Imperial Bank of Commerce

from a still higher window, gazing down over King

onto those merging histories of passing empires.

I am a seeker of warehouse eyes and radiant wilds.

overtaken by visions on roads to nowhere;

struck by sterile thunder roiling across wastelands:

Da Datta, Da Datta, Da Datta in my gut:

a rainless co-existence,

I am the taste of dust-devils on parched lips.

A walker of university quads,

I am a semi-professional actor

in a sesquicentennial production,

listening to the peal of chapel bells rounding

the Freemasonic cupola of Hart House.

There, I am a student of Gothic stone arches and carved faces of

sacrificial legends, stories of falls from the towers of Hiram.

One of many Ne’er Do Well Thespians

in the IATSE theatre below,

I perform the stations of daily-bread life

in James Reaney’s The Dismissal:

while the Ancient of Days listens to the wind;

listens for strains of The Green Man of Taddle Creek

conducting euphonic willows performed by Robertson Davies.

I am a country that remains a cathedral

because a True North is not a nation but a living land;

a place, not a gas station; my Canada

is a ruling class forever business as usual, my province

is a middle class too busy consuming values

I don’t share, my township

is a proletariat planning a tail gate party while the planet burns.

Peace they told Jeremiah, "there will be no peace,"

the spear of God replied, throwing down prophecy.

I am wails of shattered conscience

leading to baptismal immersions in the Gulf of Mexico;

I am fastings atop Smoky Mountains:

distant crucifixes dotting all ridges south

like threats from Klansmen.

I am broken childhood become

the scriptural re-phrasing of a wounded heart,

an inheritance-chest opened during theological surgery.

I am at home questing,

the still, small voice within

my only companion:

I am variations of self-knowing;

armed with an imaginary sling.

Stone-coins slung down metaphorical jukeboxes,

I am the beneficiary of a dreamscape-Bethsheba

bathing on a Chelsea Hotel rooftop; a vision

of ever-after strolls on the parapets together;

we are talking blues, sandalled in our walking shoes,

she, the mother of my once and future son,

she, solemn with wisdom, or so my stand-in story goes:

the mark of the assignment I gave myself

while attending the school of Davidic excess.

Graduate of the new heart,

I rise from dust and ashes after mourning

through liturgies of plain song,

cleansing myself with hyssop as I go.

I am gospel depths, pits of despair;

proclaiming revival.

I am agnostic decades of living vines,

improvising history on big fat lyres.

I am solos for I and Thou, duets on faith and doubt;

I am a personal niche of drum-circled ecstasies;

preparing for the day the Fat Lady swings the curtain fall.

I chant the hard and fast rebirths

of new hymnals;

I let go; get doing, walk time until here and now erupts

into flame-throwing cathedrals and mosques,

exploding temples and synagogues.

I walk the sacred earth of naked groves undying.

I am a hop, skip and a jump,

who fathered a roundelay,

after marrying a torch song, and yet,

when the wheels fell off,

it wasn't all my fault.

I am the interplay of violins and attenuated cornets:

Einsteinian glimpses of klezmer regrets bowed by mercy,

I am Teliko-freedoms blown over Cities of the Dead

from across Elysian Fields.

I am he who transcribes clogged, arterial tales

told with layers of ink and whiteout; digital erasures;

I still drink fluid measures of booze-cans under biker eyes

before tight-walking my way home that night

to rented rooms off Trinity-Bellwoods.

Swathed in desire: beauty everywhere,

I remain loneliness cued to danger and threat.

I am dance lessons transported to blues and punk clubs,

New Romantic touch-move touch-take yearnings

edged and skirted in parachute pants on Voodoo evenings,

afraid of where my choices might lead in the 1980s;

mother nature on the run among regulars dancing:

love always where I am, aching as it does towards next steps,

gyrations of instinct homing for cusps of day break;

hungering for the license to act upon

what I keep from myself,

everything on the tip of my tongue, refrains unsung,

a communion of last glances unspoken as I go,

Black Day for a White Wedding playing me home in my head.

I am a beach party before daybreak, right after the music

silences, bird voices gathering, multitudes declaring,

‘I am here, I am here’, as you are here to read or hear.

Intonations of paeans to sunrise,

I am barefoot in sand

being heated by incandescent morning among flocks lifting

out of bedewed grass evapourating waves into

shore-mists of distilled woodbines.

I am a crisis of confidence crooning my taste for maybes;

a balladeer tearing pages of penned percussives into crescendos;

a loser of everything in a world of nooks and crannies,

wells of friendships misplaced, a brother lost and gone.

I am the doh re me of yet another she,

one possessed of durable forgiveness,

one who grants the kohl dark light

of her evergreening gaze, creates hope

while two sons compose themselves as our family,

forming home around us;

sounded by towering songwriters

ionizing out of their own death notices.

I became one of those blue-eyed sons

who finally learned his song well enough to sing it:

I have seen those dozen dead oceans

from those six crooked highways

and know that sublimated sorrows

are subterranean cures for the despairs

ailing us all: weaknesses

that may yet cause our survival,

nearing the nadir of all ecological cohesion.

I am, as we each are, offspring of lyric fragments,

riven with broken everythings; known by our bent notes,

by our inertia and ecstatic caesuras, by our attempts

to tumble off the tipping point. Selah.

I am not alone in crying havoc from the watchtowers,

our house is aflame, and the children are rising.

The sensible anger of the howling mad,

I am stirring the valley of bones with spoken words.

O Son of Man, O Daughter of Eve, arise!

I am silence now, reverberating inside us.