July 20 1982

Scuttling up Yonge before dawn

the morning of my twenty-seventh birthday,

my accomplishments to date,

a filing cabinet full of manuscripts

and rejection notices.

I have driven hack and cleaned vomit

from stifling halls while King Tut's death mask

looked on with a smile,

I have parachute-panted in Voodoo's

and held court

beneath spray-painted prophecies.

I have been laid in Anglicans woods

by a woman I never met again,

I have walked streets littered with roses

scattered under after-hour crowds

on my way to booze-can dance floors

overflowing with musicians, dealers,

groupies, strippers and sundry flotsam like me.

But now with the moon hours from predawn,

clearing clouds in the tunnel of downtown

I pass the archway of stone

that stands inexplicably at the mouth of McGill,

the women's club a few row houses in:

I'd once been a guest inside with a Halloween Butterfly.

North of Wood Street, two jean-jacketed headbangers

from Scarberia wade through junk strewn about Yonge – he

in an AC/DC t-shirt and she in one claiming

'And on the 8th Day God created Led Zeppelin'

– although I can't help but doubt it.

A copy of the Plain Truth magazine sprawls

with an empty bottle of wine in a doorway.

A transvestite sits with a male, dwarf-punk prostitute

on the steps of the Country Style Donuts

eating French crullers.

In the always-open Super Duper Sub Shop

the guy with the eternally greasy ponytail is working.

"If you like Genesis you'll love Myth"

claims the poster outside the Gasworks;

'Save Daily on Supermarket Specials'

answers the ad on the Star box.

I turn off Yonge preparing myself for the way

the leaves on the trees will animate

the final play of twilight,

instead I come across two coupling cats in the gutter.

Dawn pales into rolling clouds piling up

on the distinctly planetary horizon.

My door closes behind me with a click

that no on hears but me, and Atlas,

stained glassed into the mythos of window.

Before eventual sleep, there is a call from my brother

salvaging the last vestiges of my optimism with small talk.

The Cottage

 Ordering my third beer an hour out of Union Station,

I'm intent on a woman I don't know across from me

who is in turn intent on Ontario's north shore south:

a child's drawing of lake and sky,

framed in hair and nape and gaze.

*** ***

I'm on my way to a friend's birthday.

Polly's a painter, the mistress of a married man,

the brother of the woman from the Shuffle Demon night.

I barely know either. I wish he'd go back to his wife.

*** ***

I drink too much, too quickly,

I stopped for a year and a half;

then started again with the usual excuses.

*** ***

I'm stumbling my way back to Golgotha,

not sure where the Cross is anymore,

willing only to maintain

I'd seen Calvary last spring.

*** ***

I like trains,

they're like being backstage in touring theatres:

nothing is built for the view.

*** ***

Driving in a taxi from the station, a colonial stone church

open to reveal the Sunday-best of Brockville, I stop

in a Becker's for a toothbrush – civilized as I remember

to be at the last minute. Ten minutes down Highway 2 west

the cab slows through wooded lanes and clearings,

shadowed boughs cresting the rocks

as we come to a stop on an outcrop of Canadian Shield.

A cottage perches above the St. Lawrence rolling seaward.

I'm the first here.

The keys are where they're supposed to be, hidden

beneath the porch. I'll wait for dark or my hostess …

A new moon sickles over Shield mounds

worn on the landscape like a clasp.

*** ***

The river lays itself around rock islands like

my hostess in my dreams, naked on blue sheets and pillows.

Mosquitoes disintegrate dusk and drive me off.

*** ***

Night falls Gothic outside the cottage,

the others still to arrive.

The building creaks heat from its joints.

The wind stalks leaves.

Motorboats growl demonically.

Mosquitoes draw blood.

Night swims like waters I've never been in.

Rooms from which there may be no escape

glare down at me.

I remember this place now:

every bolt-right awakening with which I once

wrenched myself from sleep insists

that this is that "Cottage", the one

where the walls bled chill winds through

too many nights.

*** ***

Fumbling with the key, intent on entering against reason,

I push open the door: blackness fades blue,

a wisp of must meets my hellos.

Invited, and yet trespassing, I stay on the stoop

as wall shadows still through the kitchen,

a silence of pantry and beyond.

History of which I know nothing surrounds me:

the possible dead whose names I've never heard

rustle in as the door closes. I leave the lights off.

Tongue and groove creak echoes the twenty-third psalm

over a long banquet table and off broad,

barely seen porch screens.

A hall turns right passed a room gaping

porcelain dolls on dressers, white faces watch my back

as I squeeze by a book-bordered room. 

Round-shouldered couches and chairs brood under a mantle.

A second floor balustrades up.

The living room vanishes as I climb. Expectations

of my ankle being grabbed from below greet each footfall.

On the top step, mid-hall, I dare not move a finger

either side of the opening.

Here is where the walls gaped,

here are the bedrooms where I slept cities away

and awoke to see them vanish as they now won't.

I leave the stairs, and turn left, not even looking right,

letting my back to fend for itself.

There are two rooms, half moonlit, sparsely furnished;

the neat beds and chairs are shuttered in.

Behind me, a black closet bores into my spine,

The arms of sleeves and the feet of slippers

hold their breath in the dark, waiting

for me to leave. Down the hall again;

past the stairwell I find other rooms,

other closets.

I come to a threshold

too black to see beyond.

I feel stairs climb. Before me – though not in the attic

or in the darkness itself; is a room in my memory where

fear like fever shudders and slowly subsides.

*** ***

Downstairs, the cottage is serene under lamplight,

the book-bordered room is sky blue: a painter's cottage, clouds drifting across walls,

 all that's left of one summer in the 1920's.

Thoughts on Leda and The Swan's

The Swan entered my awareness rising from the inner harbour near Molly Brant’s land: the deep thwup thwup thwup of its massive wings reverberating with the thrums of car, truck and motorcycle tires across the iron-grating of The Singing Bridge spanning the narrows where Cataraqui currents cross to the limestone ridge of Olympian Fort Henry where they enter the St. Lawrence River, a height from which lightning bolts once entered Leda, giving life to her offspring with Zeus, the jolt of imbalanced power romanticized by painters as love and as rape by others: forty or more such swans now on the inner harbour: some of passing for human, some passing for swans, some mixedup confusionists, others balanced between clarities of transcendent conception and the consequences of inescapable attraction, thunder storm scales of aftermath awareness becoming stillness.

The Trumpeters are now the life of the Inner Harbour party: they, the beaver, the muskrat and the sunning turtles that climb out of shallow island-worlds, are warmed into equations seemingly solved by the young, Great Blue Heron stalking frogs and fish along the shoreline to an audience of human observers.

Further out, a single Caspian Tern dives, head down, bright-beaked, folded wings framing it, shallow-fork tail-feather shifts altering the angle of split-second plunge. Successful or not, it gathers wind to climb back out of the water, rising then gliding, scanning for subsurface meals, wind and chance defining its hunt.

The reviving watercourse is Molly Brant’s dream coming to life as a vision of the planet’s atmosphere powered by ions mutating eons out of our breathing space-rock to heart beats of spiritus sapiens. The niche of our species is the niche of our divinity, a niche of an aspirational Earth breathing its own existence.

Mo and I first arrived last fall, moved into Kingston: walked Belle Park as finches flew about us among the vine-grappled oaks out by the Barriefield narrows; happy to have us in the woods of their flight through the vines pulling down mature trees, they flitted around us and limbs broken by wind-twist, landing on branches to dart off into the fractured and staggered hardwoods, bursting into the sun and back into shadows, turning us around while following their antics, catching views of the channel beyond: quick as ripples, they trace wind over water as a pair of Canada Geese slip back the way we came, the sparkled waves flickering.

On Belle Island last October, the upriver sailboat anchored the foreground of the causeway beds for the structural steel and concrete car-bridge spans-to-be, a gap reaching across the open channel from either side.

The work, re-started with spring, was that of ironworkers’ seen from the sandy shore. We studied the collapsed boathouse wharves across the nearer way, their rustic integrity fallen inward, sunken; mostly whole, supporting the view of certain-death by redevelopment, by the vines of power drawn like decision-making in warm sand with a naked foot washed by a wave: the weight of our bodies indenting heels, arches, pads and toes, a construction-free afternoon considering a quiet drift into the evening of our species. Waves and airs linger, serene: effervescence heals as we walk poplar stands through inland meadows, swans in coves either side of the widening point. The sussurations of long grasses stirring river breeze before our subsequent breaths.

Making for the marsh corner path, our route parallels the beaver ponds alongside the chain-link fence up the rising ground to where the creek ridge limestone banks fall towards us from the culvert at the closed road to Rideau St. The curtain-spread of cut links drape off pipe rails opening into old tannery paths now in the care of the Earth, the woods beyond filled with garbage dumped by those incapable of sorting the costs of bags emptied during walk-throughs among the abandoned campsites of the winter dispersed homeless; heaps strewn among the concrete-jutting, twisted iron-rods of the old foundations and red clay ruins of the tannin bath; dumps among grape vine tangles enroute through the blackened remains of trees set fire-to by mental health poor squatters with drug and alcohol problems, living on lousy food, fending for themselves for and against one another on land in need of its own healing, their only witnesses the beaver, squirrels, chipmunks and the wary deer long since fled.

Human paces have been slowed by variants-of-planetary-interest in whether to keep our species, or kill us off along with everything else in our niche; replace us with new symbiotic creatures, in our case, with ones possessing more genuine powers of common purpose than our own.

The twisting similarities and dissimilarities between what people create and what exists, play out of these toxic places: the turtles, now resting from caring for the chemical stew of the floor of the Inner Harbour, commune with the sun on the ribs and centre beams of the rusting hull of the disintegrated boat off the Cotton Mill; slip with dusk back into the mud of their mysteries: the offspring of divinities in constant metamorphosis.  

As treason next door

As treason next door unfurls the flags and symbols of fallen enemies;

recycled history plays itself out in halls swimming in the blood of historic agenda decay rates.

Back when business-was-usual, seeds were sown around the world to assist homegrown tyranny, 

a global mercenary takeover in process, gangster capitalists, the Grifter King and his court of

arms dealers and money lenders now floundering in daylight.

Nothing, from the first tweet to the last challenged ballot to the insurrection was unexpected, 

an end inevitable since the President first began to lie in the Oval Office without shame, 

allowed to continue as the republican media fed fantasies to their goats, 

Trump goading them to trample the sheeple in their demonic parody of Christianity.

Rupert Murdoch's ill-spirited print and broadcast agenda made all this inevitable,

sins of omission and commission aired and published like bait to which Donald's Jesusadis 

rose to his dark trumpeting, to his nihilist cynicism, entrancing them, ensuring they were

unable to see or feel the surrender of their doubts while entering his alternate reality,

denying every collision with all that is actual.

Many will deny him before the end: witnesses and enablers

of the vanities of the Grifter King, the greatest con in American history,  a man

without conscience. If nothing else, his place secured as the great manipulator,

will contain him in a madness far worse than that of old King George.

The fey enchanter of followers who believe him to be Jesus the Second come,

a Grifter King-sized Anti-Christ for all able to discern  his true character in a glance, his disciples

lost in the litany of lies fed to them by forgers of treason, by the adherents of slavery, 

by wannabe warriors of cultural and actual genocide, by underwriters 

of indentured servitude trade systems, overblown 

in the love of their manifest platitudes, and dismembered beatitudes.

As treason next door unfolds in competing strains of high noted spewtrails of breadcrumb news 

half-baked by sociopaths, the underbelly of the governed cannot help but slouch towards bedlam,

tracing the increments of classical republican decay, with orchestratrations by 

a cohort of  well-heeled, swamp creatures with red ties to the underbelly of gangster capitalists.

We have reached the endgame of The Republic's Platonic prophecy where

the degenerate pursuit of private property and profit gives rise

to popular tyranny, committed to the goal of suppresing the chaos of democratic neo-liberal 

boutique identity politics, a tyranny already unravelling more coinspiracies

while the warrior philosophers take the stage, desiring neither profit nor property 

for restoring the handwritten page that first constituted the Democratic Republic,

servers of sworn truths, not held by the Grifter King or his enablers.

The bewildered, the befuddled, the delusional and the defiant have now had their received reality

shoved back in their faces by shield wielding defenders of capitol, which is when their prayers of 

deliverance unraveled into the conspiracy of corrupt cops bent on opening chaos, getting 

one of their own killed by the brute force of gate crashers and one fire extinguisher wielding man 

gone mad, because reality wasn't yielding the way it should have been, given the promises made

by treasonous congressmen, truths they had been told turning into lies; the entire world watching 

the internal compasses of republicans run amok among the haywires.

Lost now in the triumph of the defeat that forever unites them, the insurrectionists 

celebrate their small victories while law enforcement tracks down the self-produced evidence

of their joy of breaking and entering, their selfies of smashing, of smearing their nation’s 

sacred spaces with feces during their ecstatic victories of delusion, laying bare their crimes,

petty and otherwise, even as the human instinct for turning on others to save ourselves

continues to betray them, each to each disloyal to self-evident truths discarded,

each having chosen but not yet ready to face having acted, some never will,

the parchments of their nation's sacred declarations, like words never written, replcaed by

QANON's  Babbling Tower of breadcrumbs caving in around their homes and jobs,

losing their podiums platform after platform along with those of their traitor-in-chief, 

collapsing suits playing out  the charade of their intentions; their prayers unanswered, 

the end not far off, betrayed by reality, by what they chose to disbelieve about what was actual; 

their love of the grifter who would be king, leading to the death spiral of their hopes 

on the wrong side of history; the gyre of a despair some may never understand,

holding them forever in place, forever unable to see how they seperated themselves 

from the sheeple they despise following the goatherd to hell.

The sands of the time for repentance and confession

are already shifting beneath the proud boys and girls of inglorious intent 

during the still unfolding days before the inauguration of their worst nightmares, 

the plot still unfolding as they go into withdrawal from the daily loss of the QAnon junk 

they shot into the veins of their movement, the hells of sobriety now theirs to endure

in the cold light of futures lost.