Montreal

“No more rain,
No more roses.”
-Tom Waits


“I came here to write, that’s all.”
Looking out over the city:
The steam rising from buildings,
Cascading through the alleys,
Billowing down, dissipating,
Towards the bouncing pedestrians
Of the business district.
The rooftops breathe, pulse,
As the city prepares for the fall of night.
The hollering has begun early this evening,
Young francophone men call, searching
For each other in the narrow streets,
They stop to piss, which drains downhill
Slaloming through the cobblestone
Past visitors from Bratislava, Rabat, Cairo,
Kiev, the Azores, Buenos Aires, Osaka,
Bogota, Bergen, Freeland, Tampere,
And the other curves of the globe;
The world comes here to vanish into
A horse drawn past captured by buildings,
Language, cuisine, and atmosphere.
I cling to my bottle of wine and notebook,
Gazing down from my room at the matinee
Theatre crowd filing into the Centaur
For a production of Scorched,
A biting slice of Middle Eastern strife.
I saw it the night before and felt guilty,
Not for the plight of the characters,
Or the atrocity of the crimes within,
But for absorbing the words of another,
When I should have been crafting my own.
“I came here to write, plain and simply.
The city, you see, can ignore me,
You can have her, as far I’m concerned.
I am here to write, nothing more.
Leave me to my room, my desk,
Let me create, let me imagine, let the pen work.”
Drunken idealistic words, spoken on some lost night,
To an old drunk who didn’t speak the language.
This would be a literary marvel,
I convinced myself: Inhalation of the muse,
Exhalation of the art, sparked by the rhythm
Of fingertips wrapping, tap tap tap,
Against the keyboard, translating the chaos
Infiltrating my wine soaked mind.
All hyperbole, little substance, and even less product.
I spent nights, mornings haunted by verbs, nouns
And that elusive, unique cadence:
I lay drunk, nightly, shouting out to the muses,
Looking for, begging for my Prufrock,
My Byzantium, my prince of darkness,
My Laura, my Duchess, Ozmandias,
Grecian Urn, Malone, Molloy, or Watt;
Where was my immortality?
A decade with the beast,
Ten years of this obligation, nothing,
Nothing to show. Years, no, decades
Remain to struggle, to flit, to dismiss
Failed attempts and broken poetry:
A haunted lifetime of verbs, nouns,
Quatrains, syntax, tempo, inflection,
A fleeting sense of wonder,
The ups and downs of creation,
And that unquenchable thirst to release,
To spring the constraints of my mind
And allow the liberation of energy to
Surge through my fingers
Onto the page, and, finally, exhausted,
I will have my satisfaction.
“I came here to write…but only typed.
A steady rhythm of words, but no meaning.
Nothing behind them, nothing yet.
I sat at the desk, chased the muse
Through the districts of my mind,
Tugged, yanked, scratched at her,
But took only skin flakes, nail clippings,
And a tuft of auburn hair: the minutiae.
She escaped with the remainder,
With my brilliance and I continued
Typing, watching the emptiness fill the screen.
I’ve years left to fail--years to fall short,
To know much more lies within—and though
I fail, I get closer each time.”