Saturday, 18 July 2015

Stranger Than Fiction, 16

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.

 

 


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