In 1996 Our little Christian community died a natural death. RIP. Dopey, who effectively had been bankrolling the operation once our savings had run out (though I paid for the food and bills), moved out, having found alternative housing for seniors. It was about time. She was aging fast and already being hobbled by some major health concerns. The Very Nice Young Man and I went our separate ways and I found an apartment in East Vancouver, a rather large bachelor unit on the ground floor of the building.
The noise issues in my new home began almost the first day of my occupancy. There was a very heavy footed tenant upstairs and music and TV could be often heard a little too well. There was also an aging hooker upstairs in another unit and I frequently saw her bringing her johns into the building from my window. We became friends and eventually she agreed that if she could convince any of her...er...clients to buy my art, plainly visible through my window, I would give her a generous percentage. It didn't gel but it was a nice try, so to speak.
I was not ready yet to thoroughly abandon the idea of community. Dopey remained friends with each of us individually, myself, Dippy and Flippy. Dippy had found affordable housing in Dopey's neighbourhood and was basically back in Dopey's service as her maidservant. Flippy was living in an SRO in the Downtown Eastside, when he wasn't homeless. His bad temper and violent streak became a liability to him and was frequently denied housing because of this. I wasn't on speaking terms with either one of them. Dippy, from her morally superior perch in the fundamentalist church she was attending fairly insisted that I needed healing. When I asked her healing from what she would go totally evasive on me. I always found her to be incredibly mealy-mouthed and dishonest, by the way. And anyway she should talk since she was quite openly shagging this really horrible person she had taken under her wing, the same individual who, believing all her slander about me, decided that I was some horrible person that God had called him to extinguish from the face of the earth. It got so bad in the following years that he was at times stalking and threatening me. In 2005, just when I was really getting concerned for my safety and wellbeing, he was brutally murdered in the middle of the night. The assailant was never found. And no I had nothing to do with it.
I tried to get as many hours of work as possible though they never allowed me to work above twenty hours a week. They otherwise would be obligated to put me on their dental plan. From May of that year till September I was plagued with the worst toothaches I had ever suffered from. They always arrived at the end of the month, would last for a week, then subside. My bosses refused to increase my hours no matter how much I pleaded, using the most dreadful lame excuses. Their bottom line, or should I say, maintaining a good profit margin, trumped my needs for dental care. I was earning a low wage and after food and rent could not afford a dentist. I was also informed that the wait list for free treatment from students at the school of dentistry were incredibly long. So I suffered.
I began spending a lot of time with punk rocker friends I had made in some of the venues I had been hanging out in during my ministry of presence. We for a while did form a sense of community that was really inclusive and often had soirees and potlucks at one another's homes. This was for me a very refreshing interlude and I still remember those times fondly. We were all incredibly creative, bright, sensitive and thinking people. We were also all incredibly damaged.
I painted, showed and sold my art and did portrait commissions, not enough to really pay the bills. I made new friends. I worked well with my clients. I went for long walks. I journalled and wrote relentlessly. I was also writing tonnes of poetry, some of it very good and was a regular reader of my work at an open stage poetry event in my neighbourhood every month. My poetry was very well received though I never found a place to publish. Here is a sampling for your reading enjoyment:
Dance of the Corn Goddess
First Cycle
I
The Summer Solstice
Is the last day,
The longest and only day.
It presages the death march of winter.
The blossoms are all died from the leafed branch,
And the young fruit
Hidden and green
Swells in obscurity—
Silent progressions of
Hours, minutes, seconds
Touching in subliminal transmutations
The unripe apple, the hard plum.
Shade for the lovers
Resting together in the long grass
Already yellow and dying
From the scorching sun that
Warms the shade-mottled skin.
The air is still-
Occasionally
A faint breeze from the ocean
Cools the places untouched by shade,
Where the Corn-Goddess walks
And the flies
Negotiate
The offerings of cow shit that litter the field.
Summer is the season of cows.
Cows chewing their cud,
Listless tails chasing off flies
That land
Even on the warm brown limbs
Of the sleeping lovers.
On a pale granite surface
The sundial marks
Its shortest shadow.
Robins peck open the ripening cherries
Before being themselves ripped asunder
By the predacious falcon.
And the cows
And the lovers
Doze placid
At the feet of the corn-Goddess,
Dreaming restively
Of butter churns and abattoirs
In the gathering summer heat.
And the red streaks
Of the morning east
And the evening west
Mark like bloodied bookends
The opening and closing
Of the midsummer day.
II
The blanc mange is golden,
A perfect wedge,
Over which the shining red strawberries
Are ladled beneath the clotted cream—
Red and white,
White on red,
The life-giving seed piercing through to
The ovulating life,
Though she has not ovulated in well over a decade,
Nor has the living seed of a caressing lover
Fructified, in a very long time, her secret regions.
Among other old women,
Canopied beneath sheltering sun hats
Against the midsummer fire.
She titters about calories and self-indulgence,
And mutters about the dimensions of her hips and thighs
Long ago too scrawled with varicose veins
And stucco-textured cellulite
To attract anything
But the detached compassion
Of other femmes du certaine ages,
And the bewildered revulsion of the young,
Those svelte and smooth-limbed fauns
And goddesses
Who owe their lissome existence
To the fact
Of those time-ravaged thighs
Having once spread wide
In silent ecstasies
To receive the shaft and root of life.
Spreading wide again,
Portals of the earth,
Bringing them forth to life
While screaming forth the birth agonies of the damned,
It wasn’t long
Before those gleaming white thighs,
Birth-damaged
Became scrawled with blue varicose veins,
illegible graffiti of thankless
progeny,
and stuccoed with nodules of fat,
textured road maps
of the convoluted route
along which all of us must travel.
Like lusty centaurs
Their grandchildren
Roll along outside the church garden party
On skateboards,
Their hair streaming in multihued abandon,
Smooth skin shining
And scrawled with tattoos
Of green and blue arabesque.
They will never die,
They shall never grow old and die,
Not like us,
Not like we
Who once promenaded
Slender and smooth-limbed in sundresses
Of white and pastel organdy,
Hairy faun-legs concealed
From the lust-bidden eye
In flannel, tweed or gabardine.
The young will always be a problem
To the old
Who would sooner forget
That they too were once immortal,
Who were once immune,
Invulnerable
To the sun’s toxic fire.
III
The flies are swarming—
They descend and light
On the shortcake
And on the cow shit-
It’s all food to them.
The sky shimmers
Like molten turquoise
Mingled with lapis and gold.
Deaf to the shouting of youth,
Deaf to the tittering and mutterings
Of their spent grandmothers,
The lovers lie in the field
Among the reposing cows,
The shade and the breeze
Cooling their warm naked skin
Beneath the tumescent green fruit
Hidden in the leaves.
There is a sound of crows nearby,
And in the distance
The laughter of children.
The flies are everywhere.
Downtown
The pavement is too hot
To sit bare-limbed in the sun,
So the street youth must beg in the dank shade
Of stark and grotty alcoves,
Some of whom are lovers
Who lie bare-limbed in the shade
While their grandmothers gorge
At strawberry teas.
The flies are everywhere.
And soon the lovers
Must depart from the field,
Away from the cows
And away from the fruiting tree;
And soon the lovers must separate
Each to their private portal,
Each to the passages
That lie along the textured roadmap
That will lead them through the iron doors
That have remained forever locked to all
But to those for whom the raven calls in antiphon
To the screaming peacock
Underneath the tree of life
That grows in the midst of the garden of the blessed.
Second Cycle
I
This blue and green earth
Spins always on the same tilt,
Never altering its illusory axis
As it travels round a flaming yellow star
In order to generate the changes of seasons,
Which depend entirely upon
The position of its elliptical journey, perpetual pilgrimage
Marking winter in Canada
While summer in New Zealand:
Summer in England while winter in Argentina.
The benign gases that swaddle our planet
Have kept us safe from the poisonous solar rays
That have since penetrated
The fraying ozone;
Kissing with ultraviolet venom the pale skin and blue eyes
Of a race of creatures that have ruled for too long,
Whose reign of power, of vile industry
And machines of death
Have poisoned the earth, water and air
Tearing open the protective shroud,
That the solar retribution
May slay us in its benign wrath.
Ladies and gentlemen,
And boys and girls
Must anoint now their sallow hides
With medicated grease:
Sunglasses and broad-brimmed hats
Protective clothing to conceal the alluring flesh
As we venture out
To picnics and barbecues
And a day at the beach.
It just ain’t safe no more
Lyin’ butt-naked in the searing heat,
Cooking our hides like barbecued ducks;
Like the peasants of an earlier age we
Brown ourselves,
Like the kaffirs and coolies and Bengalis
On whose bones our civilization was built,
Whose bones lie now buried
Beneath the foundation stones
Of our walled cities.
White skin is again fashionable
As we cower in the shade,
Eating our summer fruit
Picked by the labouring brown hands
Of the migrant labourers we despise.
And the earth spins on its illusory axis,
Never shifting,
Nor changing position
Beneath its threatened ozone,
And the earth turns away
From the warming, burning, enlivening and destroying sun,
And the day passes into night;
It is safe again to wander freely
In the street, in the open air,
But for the gunshot, and the mugger’s knife.
Tempers, hormones and passions are stimulated
In the heat of the sun,
And let loose their evening frenzy—
The sirens wail, the orchestra begins
The music of the summer night—
We can dance all night,
And we can dance all night
Underneath stars
Rendered invisible
By pulsating neon and strobe;
To the music of crickets and frogs
Drowned out
But never silenced
By the perpetual techno beat
Of the midsummer night,
As the young beggars
Conceal themselves in squats,
Underneath stairwells, in doorways;
Their grandmothers are lulled
By TV mysteries
And golden oldies radio
As they daub on their wrinkle cream
And then lie down alone in their empty beds
Muttering to themselves or to their cats
And their little dogs too—
They are drugged on hot milk—
And they lie awake hearing only
The mosquitoes’ pervasive whine
Before tottering into uncertain sleep
And forgotten dreams
Of those pelvic thrusts
Of many summer nights removed.
The lovers are nowhere to be seen.
The fly is sleeping on the wall,
Between the light switch
And the sunny Van Gogh print,
That was hung by the shaded and shuttered window.
II
Wars and rumours of war
Break out in red acne
All over this green and blue earth:
Riots, forest fires and women weeping over their fallen sons
And cellulite.
Weep no more, my daughters:
The fruit is ripening on the trees,
Poison apples and bitter
Among the sweet and mellow plums.
The grandmothers chafe about string bikinis
Which they never got to wear,
Saying nothing of bulgy men in g-strings.
The fat of civilization’s excess
Sags pale and pendulous
Over elastic waistbands.
We risk the solar impregnation,
As we flaunt our pale and burning flesh
Like the inhabitants of a butcher’s display window.
We are cannibals,
We are all cannibals
Behind designer sunglasses,
Even the vegetarians
Chewing on tofu wieners
By the softly pounding surf,
The ebbing tide that lulls
But never wakes us
With its rhythm of our mothers’ heartbeat.
III
They gather now in crowds and droves,
This evening of the summer heat.
The sun has gone down,
And lining the beaches
The crowds mingle like lost cattle
Herded by boredom to the water’s edge
For fireworks set to music,
Symphony of fire,
Visual and sonic poem
To the glory of a cigarette company:
Paeans of praise and adulation
That echo throughout
Every cancer ward and crematorium across the land.
Now we can inhale sulfuric fumes
Mingled with the usual tar and nicotine.
Isn’t death grand:
And not with a bang but a whimper, indeed.
Icon of corporate fascism
Exploding in chromatic splendour,
Blinding the blind eyes
With those colours of daylight,
Hard spectacle of sunlight
Incandescent on the water,
Incandescent in the green leaves,
The jewelled spectrum of the morning dew—
Things most of us have forgotten how to see,
Have never learned,
Or bothered
Are played out now
In flames of sulfuric perdition
To the music of life
Bastardized in the marketing of death
In all its mutational,
Metastasizing grandeur.
In hundreds of thousands
By the edge of those waters
Fouled past redemption
By our industries and bodily wastes
We stand in gormless, lobotomized wonder.
And were are the lovers?
Where are the cows:
Where is the Corn-Goddess?
Together we stand here
On this shore of perdition,
Grandmothers with sagging dugs
And youths with firm flesh,
Tattoos and carcinogenic suntans,
Losing for a few moments
In this fascist spectacle, this demi-orgasm
All that divides
And unites us.
Third Cycle
I
Their hands are brown
With golden lights,
Callused palms
And fingernails filled with the life-giving dirt
The inheritors of the earth
Have laboured in.
Every spring these hands dig and furrow the ground,
They plant the life-giving seed,
Awaiting the fruit the grain
And the opium poppy
To ripen to maturity
In the sun’s hot splendour.
They sing from the planted furrows
And the corn-Goddess dances among the sheaves
Long before the first cuneiform script
Was encoded on ancient stone,
Long after the last micro-chip is lost in the rubble
Shall these hands labour in the soil,
To the music of the earth
As it spins on its unaltered tilt
Around the flaming yellow star.
And the last empire shall crumble into the dust
Which one day shall nourish and renew the earth
When the Corn-Goddess
Dances elliptical flourishes
Around the Christ Child
Who stands in the centre.
II
The tree of life spreads wide its fruiting branches
Over the slumbering cows.
The lovers are long gone from here,
Dancing now in distant fields,
Grandmothers, youths, fauns and goddesses
And the summer sun blazes and dies
A little sooner each cool evening towards
The denouement of autumn.
They are golden now. Their
voices singing and ringing together
In the dappled light
For death and life
Are swallowed up together
In the root, trunk, leaves and fruit
Of the sacred tree in the garden.
The dead bless the living
Who fear their coming demise,
When we too must join in the dance
Round the tree of life;
Flaming countenance of the Christ Child.
III
Soon the wheat shall be stored in the barn,
Soon the grape will yield forth
The vintage wine
That stains alike the raw silk and the polyester.
The nights are tolerable now,
Longer,
Less heat and light
To slap and scorch us
Into disquieting wakefulness.
The TV has never stopped playing,
And DVD’s
Make it hard to distinguish
That the robins are no longer singing.
While peasants trace and observe
The birds’ southern migrations,
Some of us will lie awake in the night
Caressed but not soothed,
And some of us shall arise from our beds,
And leave behind
The sleeping lovers,
Cats and little dogs—
Half-consumed warm milk,
Magazines
And Agatha Christie face down
On freshly dusted night tables.
We will dress, or forget to dress
But we shall leave them all behind.
We will leave them all behind.
We will wander out of the numbing safety of our houses and condominiums
We will dance along the aromatic pissed-upon concrete,
We will dance past the hookers,
We will dance past the sleeping young beggars and the homeless
With the christ child and the corn Goddess
We will dance into the dark mystery,
Into the silence that bids us
To wake and watch
For the coming light,
The consuming flame that spares nothing
Save for the tree of life
Whose ripened fruit
Has begun to fall
Into the golden grass
Of the garden of our awakening.
