RAINY, RAINY DAYS

POEM: after father

after father

saying,

“i don’t want to tell you

how to live your life.”

and you think

that’s all you really want—

for him to tell you how

and why

and where,

and to say this way is best;

take this path

and follow it to the end.

“you can, I know you can do it.”

and afterwards,

after the rituals and the incense,

after the words and the prayers;

after the pyre’s roaring flames—

after the ashes

and soot-tinged greetings

and incessant offerings

of possibility;

afterwards there comes

the missed voice,

whose vibrations

once filled life,

filled lives.

and later still,

after the echoes

from faded rooms

and crowded streets

that are the lonely lanes

of a beating heart;

after the winds that pass

through the wheat,

parsing,

untended,

the seed from chaff;

after the burning sun

of a noon-time valley,

and after being stretched so thin

(leather-hide thin)

by each day’s passing;

after all this,

only “try harder"
is left to stay.

     Another poem with my father in mind. An older one, closer to the time he died in 1999. Perhaps written a few years after, though I can’t remember for sure. It evokes sorrow and loss in me, and I hope it does the same for you (and if it evokes giggles, then I’ll refer you to some of my cartoons and doodles, where I hope you’d laugh with them than at them—but, hey, everybody’s a critic of something or other.)

     I guess my favourite lines are: “after the echoes/ from faded rooms/

and crowded streets/ that are the lonely lanes/ of a beating heart” which evoke the memories we’ve all had of being lonely and feeling adrift like flotsam amid a sea of crowds. We always feel this sometime or other after the loss of a loved one (one who was never told enough how he was loved) and if you don’t, dear reader, feel this sometime or other during your life, then I refer you to the website sociopath.com*, where I am sure you can find other like-minded and emotionally-deficit people such as yourself to chat with!)

     I wanted a greater sense of ceremony of a funeral than the usual, often plastic and antiseptic services most of us participate in today, hence, “the pyre’s roaring flames”. Death is a big industry in Canada. Mawd Google tells us it has 1.6 billion dollars in revenue as of 2015. Wow! Far out, man! Somehow, standing around a funeral pyre while a loved one’s body is burning into ashes while smoke rises up to the sky strikes me as a more solemn, or at least memorable, occasion than sitting in pews or standing at a grave with the pile of excavated dirts covered  up with what looks like indoor-outdoor carpeting. But I quibble; we make such ceremonies as solemn and memorable as we are willing. I wanted to convey the loneliness and isolation that someone feels after the death of someone you love. Having other people in your life is so helpful (usually) to share the burden of loss. When that’s not the case, you can feel adrift in the world, and have unproductive ways of dealing with your grief (even to the point where you can’t grieve at all) that leave unresolved the emptiness inside. So cry your sorrows away, dear reader, that’s what tears are for.  

The photograph was taken—I think—in the early 1940s or perhaps late 1930s, even. I believe it was taken sometime before WWII, because my father always talked about the job he had either before, during or shortly after university (I can’t recall which) where he spent time up north around Lake Superior, doing survey work for Ontario Hydro (or whatever it was called back then), for the construction of canals that would bring water to the downstream electricity generating stations so that, today, I could sit at this computer and type these words. Thanks, Dad!

     My father is the handsome, toqued young man in the middle who seems to be nautically-challenged somewhat, and is putting on a brave show for the camera. His pose, clinging on to the sides of the canoe, suggests he definitely feels out of his element, and is a little uncomfortable floating around freezing northern waters. The photo was attached to the poem “after father” that I found in the burial mound I was excavating, and I thought I would include it here. Cheers.

* Now, I should have remembered that this is the Age of the Internet. I just made up the website’s name, but out of habit, I checked Mawd Google, and, of course, there is an actual website with that name. It’s just a page announcing that psychologist, Dr. David A. Johnson, is currently writing a book about sociopaths. The page is a bit creepy with its black background, and it has an Amazon.com link to a 2016 book called, The Sociopath Next Door, with its equally creepy, murky brown cover on display. Both give me the willies, like somebody just walked over my grave! So, for all those sociopaths out there reading this—I will never, ever, poke fun at you. So please don’t put me screaming into a bath of hydrochloric acid; I have very sensitive skin.

POEM: TAG

Tag

There! There!

Mark your name now by the stair.

On the wall your human essence;

in the wood is carved your presence—

the commuting of a sentence

on the stairwell wall.

     A bit of silliness I felt was somehow justified as belonging on this blog. The cartoon or silly scrawl, or whatever it is was done after 911, and it reminded me of graffiti. The poem may have been written when I was at university, though I am not sure. I just ran across this as I was breaking into the mausoleum for some old bones, and I dug up this chalky bit. And I thought about my time at university when I wrote a piece of graffiti at the bottom of a stairwell in one of the university residences, going as far down as I could crawl under the descending stairs. It read: "Midget Power!" (I was majoring in Irony at the time.) I wonder if it’s still there. I can also recall, later on, writing “This was a nice room” above the headboard of my bed in the wood of the built-in shelves of my room at university, where the cleaning staff would likely overlook it. The next semester, some girl who got my room (it was a co-ed floor—very progressive, you-know, and wink-wink for the times!) mentioned it to me, and we laughed and shared the joke. 

Also, a piece of graffiti written in a tunnel that ran from my residence to the main student building is etched into my brain. It became stuck there as I traversed the tunnel in various states of sobriety, pub-crawling (and sometimes just plain crawling) my way to a degree. The tunnel was long and quite necessary in the winter. If you’ve ever seen pictures of Russian gulags, that’s what the university I went to during the last ice age was like in the winter months: it was about the bleakest and most f@#kingly depressing place on earth! Three out of four seasons it was great, but winter was "please, just shoot-me!" season. The graffiti went something like:

Watch ‘em grow,

Chew them toes.

See how them arctic snows blows! 

    

Yep. That just about says it all....

     Recently, I read an article about the world’s most famous graffiti-artist, Banksy, whose painting of one of his street works sold at auction for something like a million bucks. It apparently had a device in the frame that shredded the painting just after it was sold. There’s a photograph of stunned bidders at the London auction house of Sotheby’s staring in disbelief as Girl With Balloon came out the bottom of the frame in ribbons. Fake news? Quite possibly--the photo looked a bit contrived. Who knows? I don’t really care. Nevertheless, Bansky sure has a lot of cheek! I know there’s irony in there somewhere--a lot! But these days, it seems everything is awash in that well-honed literary device, from Presidents without the brains of a Poptart, to a Pope who skates around pedophiles like an ice follies star, so that pointing any more out would be like trying to shill stones in the Stone Age!  

Anyway, for a lot less than a million bucks I’m willing to shred any and all graffiti I’ve ever done over the years. And how! Art doesn’t last forever, you know. But does anything, you ask? Our world, in a few billion years or so will be a nothing more than a pile of star ash (barring any nasty business in the meantime with extinction-level comets or 'oopsie' nuclear exchanges.) So what gets left behind will go away in the end. Somewhere. Or our writings, our artifacts, our structures and places will become so different, or we become so different, that we can’t make sense of them, or understand what they mean anymore. Eventually, we lose touch with what we leave behind; that’s just the way of it. And for those who chance upon what we leave behind, they will only see only what they can understand. And that, too, is how things are meant to be.

Tag suggests that whatever we touch, and whoever and however we touch, takes something away from us—some part of our essential ourselves, our being. In touching, in leaving behind something, there is a kind of forgiveness. For what exactly, I’m not sure. But it’s there, and it’s real. And I say this without a trace of irony....

criminal

like a thumbprint

on a wall

not yet dusted

for prints,

i’m here,

your treasure

in my arms. 

I fell into the dirty hole of nostalgia and found this near the bottom, covered in the dirt and litter of half a lifetime. "criminal" was written in the 2000s sometime, but the photo is of York University's main student building as seen from the bottom of a rather depressing set of stairs. The architecture is of the 1960s' "Brutalist" form, and I think the description is an apt one. Concrete  and brutal functions describes the place to a tee, at least physically, back then. [WARNING: If you stare too long at the photo, the photo starts to stare back! Ed.] I have no idea what it's like now; hopefully it's more human-friendly.  For me, this building and its designer belong in a gulag! The photo was one I had attached (digitally) to the "Tag" poem. The stairwell is not the one I 'tagged' and mentioned above. 

As far as the poem, "criminal", goes, it’s concerned with relationships, and the feeling of being invisible or unnoticed; when you feel undetectable to your partner (or a more technical term I like to use—your "main squeeze!"). Perhaps this feeling indicates that the relationship is about to end, or that there will be some sort of change. I like the fact that the speaker tells the listener that their "treasure" (whatever it is) is something the speaker thinks is important enough to hold on to, even if they feel criminal doing so. It's unclear whether the speaker addresses his or her listener directly. (It's almost like they're a 'sticky' note' on the wall, waiting to be read.)  

I assume the thumbprint is mine. Guilty, as always.

Cheers

Martian Selfie c. 2019