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.
