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.”

Flight from Despondency

The places men go to die are never crowded:
I heard the patter of the feet above,
Through the melange of brambles and thorns
I could see the heels pivot,
Kicking up dirt towards my hovel.
I came here to be taken,
To disappear, to defeat panic,
The incessant rumbles of terror,
And the cycle of recidivism
That led to these terminal thoughts.
I came here to forget (to be forgotten):
The world has songs, innumerable,
Full of sad men navigating, muted,
Through empty city streets
Looking for a spot to drop,
To cease the weariness
And the footsteps echo through
Everything and recede into the night.
I came here to vanish, committed absolutely,
Short of lighting the pyre,
And subjected to segregation,
Felt ever closer to the decision
While the thundering of the footfalls above
Seemed to spread out in all directions:
Away.
I came here, tired of the quarrel,
To quell the material realm:
All that empirical devastation.
As the brambles began to close,
Tightly coiling astride my neck,
Pinching the carotid artery,
I saw her toes,
Curled in over the edge of my pit,
Lined together, split by a black latch,
Facing me, slicing through the thorns.
Luminous, radiant and brilliant
Her vibrancy lit the cell,
Shattering the darkness,
Revealing the graphic and ghastly form.
Ignorant no longer, I rose,
Stretched towards the surface,
Clutching what I could,
Pulling myself up from the depths
Of the barbed, piercing patch.
In my ascent, the thorns took skin,
Blood, hair, ripping and tearing as I climbed,
Leaving scars that would never heal.
I felt each injury with an exaggerated sensitivity,
Yet continued slashing through the vile garden.
I stood, faced the sky, battered, bruised and torn,
And there it was: my world, my life
And, below in the reflection of a gutter side puddle,
I saw my eyes and witnessed the return of my wonder.
Reborn and empty, I strode down the promenade,
To begin again, the collection of knowledge,
Love, and the thirst for all there is,
All there will be.

A Monologue on the Muse

“Each dawn, along the promenade,
Heading west with a new sun chasing me
And a dim morning moon tracing my trail,
I walked towards the end of our street,
Past the bungalows and side-splits,
Through the narrow, overgrown path
Leading to Front Street.

“There hidden amongst the long grass,
The foliage and debris—remnants of forts,
Late nights and forgotten adolescent dreams—
A small patch of growth, closed off
With a chain link fence (rusted over by time and wind),
Hid alone and invisible to the passing crowds,
Until I happened upon it that summer morning.

“Pulling back the thicket and fencing,
I revealed an unfettered bed of heather,
Which stood matted, thick, domineering;
A dictator among the reeds and stalks,
But there within the clutter
I spotted a lone yellow tulip,
Jutting out majestically towards the sun.

“Swimming handful by handful through the heather,
Deliberate and slow (hesitant, careful),
I exposed the thick stem as a cloud released
Its grip upon the sun.
Under the fresh light, the beauty, the perfection,
Of that lone tulip unveiled itself
And I stood, captured by the moment.

“I fingered the keys in my pockets,
Wanting to cut the stem at the bottom,
Wanting to have the flower for myself,
But stopped, looking into the petals, the cup,
And understanding immediately
This was the fruit of the earth
And I was forbidden to possess it.

“Ingesting its pure vapours in delight,
I turned to leave, looking back,
The heather flattened around the tulip,
As if kneeling before its mastery,
And the solitary yellow blossom
Sat upon its throne, showered in artistry,
I carried away its fragrance to keep forever.

“I walked through the fescue, returning to the path,
Advancing towards the lake to walk along the edge,
Kicking the tide as it rode in,
I found a stick and dug into the silt,
I wrote a name in the sand, dotting the “i”
Just as the moon swept the shores of the world
And now, my boy, I can’t recall her name.”

Coming Soon...

I'm putting together a list of my top 10 favourite cities that I have visited. I will dedicate a page or two to each city and my experiences of each. Once i get some time I will get right to work on them. Sneak peak: #10. Tallinn, Estonia. Stay tuned.

A Crisis of Faith

Letter to God

At sixteen, beneath the pallor of a wet autumn day,
In an atrium draped in silence (in calm),
More than a century after the first report,
I read of your death.
We had not spoken in some time.
Now, upon reflection, our conversations
Feel as distant as the youth
I spent meandering down river banks,
With an invisible Huck Finn,
Collecting colourful stones
That would lose their vibrancy
After drying by the woodstove.
I once, in blind adolescence,
While cataloguing chaos
Into a red (then water-stained orange) notebook,
Heaved all blame upon your shoulders,
Ignorantly placing liability
On the conscience of a ghost.
Now, I still see others reach for you
And they incite more to do the same.
Their efforts, albeit aggressive,
Breed only futilities:
In fact, this letter itself
Seems an empty exercise
In dramatic narrative;
Though, still, I write:
Fearful of the incessant notion
That my beauty, my art
Have always been linked
To the persistence of your venom
And now, in the end, there is no word,
Only Poets ravaging the rotted bark
Of a felled redwood.

To the Art Gallery

Ode to a Portrait of an Auburn Hair Girl

She’s on the fourth floor,
Between the Romantics and the Realists,
In a circular room she inhabits alone.
An entrance to the west and to the east,
A stone bench in the centre,
Where my daily vigil takes me
To watch her float upon the wall.
The people come and go,
Glancing and passing—
Some walk through without seeing her—
As her eyes illuminate the room,
But I always remain.
Beneath her bosom, dug in the stucco wall,
A label identifies her:
“Portrait of an Auburn Hair Girl,
Unknown Artist, circa 1824.”
She will not age, she will not change,
But I will return forever different.
Her beauty will outlast me and when I’m gone
Another will replace my admiration.
For now, with my remaining time, I stare:
Her hair falling majestically on porcelain shoulders;
Her eyes, two distant stars coaxing me into orbit;
Her skin, I imagine, warm to the touch,
As the hairs on my arms stand and reach towards her; and,
Her mouth, born from a stroke of mastery,
Curves on the canvas, slightly open,
And my mind recycles that same daily thought:
“Oh, if I could will those lips flesh,
Press mine to hers, we could vanish,
And become our desire.”

Alone on a Stool

Macabre Whiskey Dreams

Here the nights bring them all out:
The kings and queens,
The fools and fiends,
And they all stumble through the streets
Conscious only of every other step.
There’s a rumble there in the darkness,
The roar and exultations
Shoot through the alleys,
Illuminating the dark with violence.
Along the walls of this bar,
Like fallen angels, solitary,
Lingering and despondent in purgatory,
All the sad girls fix their hair,
Raise their dresses and scan the room
Looking for someone, anyone to see their light.
With bared teeth, they smile at no one,
Everyone and take the drinks that come,
Laughing and sighing at empty witticisms,
And hope to catch that one
Pair of eyes to fill the desolation.
I can do nothing but sit on the stool.
My back turned to the glow,
The city pulses and breathes through
The dusty window of the pub.
I could be anywhere in the world right now,
I think to myself, sipping my whiskey,
The two cubes melted and spinning
Together falling into an invisible gyre.
I see my reflection in the taps,
Stretched out and warped,
The conversationalists standing behind me,
Look further away than seems reasonable,
And appear to talk through me
As my distorted visage divides them.
I pause my meditative silence, briefly,
Rarely, nodding in agreement to another,
While I espy the wild gesticulations,
The voluminous retorts and rebuttals
Of the inebriated circle around the bar.
When I’ve had my fill I rise to leave,
Catch the eyes of a young woman
And convince myself to ignore her.
Walking home, the tips of my shoes
Flash into my vision as I stumbled along
Past barred storefronts, the embracing and the sick.
I hear voices in the distance and approaching,
I hear the laughter slowly fade out as it passes,
And ringing in my head, returning effervescently,
I hear the soft mutterings of a young girl’s tears.
Shambling down the bank, slowly, assuredly,
I feel the water brush the soles of my feet
And I collapse against the riverside,
Haunted again by those low whimpers
And I wonder where she sleeps tonight,
Where she rests her head and what she dreams.