Bay Window (Part the Last)

My bay window was my first convex lens on the world of downtown student crazy. Leaving it for bigger and more secluded rooms is a sweet'n'sour experience. As such, let us commemorate my time in a house and a window that was above all formative. When the time is ripe, I'll pour some wine into the thirsty earth. But for now, a poem. I'm sorry: a pome. (You'll notice the form is stolen. Apologies to no-one.)

Strange to think of you now as there not here—something that was despite stone pillar permanence,
You who were my carapace thru rainstorm & lightning, carrying the plodding droplets thru the windowscreen,
And now I disappear through the last crook of brick & alley, satchel in hand, and deliver my speeches to you—
Your megafauna skip, jump hopping, swaying in spiral treebranch cobwebs, flutter of fur & tail, claw & snout dreaming of the pure garbage El Dorado of our living room,
Your sheds for acting practice: human emanations lines bouncing off the walls & achieving total internal reflection—cacophony of twenty voices and twenty-five masques shattering,
Mandalas of pillows on living room walls, couches livid with expectancy where we sat talking continuous & inexhaustible & ecstatic in fishbowls in hookas in ping-pong ball elation,
Flickering of downtown fundless ghetto strobe light, vibrations on rusted poles & chin-up madness, triangular waves leaping out of cocoon shells in hopeless pianos,
Fireplaces in the mind, tho there was only a single dejected overworked halogen lamp,
Your aleatory poems scattered in calendars in paper scraps—your stories of great ritualistic suicide dramas, fame & money, music waterfalls & shots of ego centered right in the pituitary,
Pity your libraries, for their aboriginal quaternities house the werewolf screaming of the victims of CAMH—taken to the fence to vomit & beg, to smoking rooms for story time, given metrazol to calm the jimmy-legs,
And your alley too—shadows of Liverpool, vibrations of ossified society illuminated by the warbling of dreary whistling virtuosos,
Their heads will be smeared with laurel & garlic in the oblivion of the garden: trees plucked onto third-floor roofs, moonlight baking the smoke tiles & rolling off blaming nobody but the spirit of the fields,
Your cookies filled with delightful drugs losing their potency in accordance with hummingbird uranium half-lives,
Blocks falling from windows, terrible demanding OM shimmering in the darkness, the all-seeing Odin-eye of spectral laptops, sunny guitar twang in living room shaking the tiles into cracks down to the foundation, books passing from hand to hand instantly felt & known,
Bright eyes & parades of clothes & gestures & bottles & cushions, mounds of dirt tracked in foreboding inevitable earthworm invasions, dark pool-eyes sneaking in the middle of nights, vicious toe-stubs & cowering with bamboo poles clutched to chests,
Memory-wok in rooms with mildew dripping thru ceilings, storied clumsy exposition seven novels’ worth,
Iridium deposits in back-yard piles, meat for the metallurgist vegan thrown in the dumpster,
Honour to your hallucinating night-walks of people behaving badly, sprained ankles & crutches, overdoses & unconsciousness when the burning coals fell to almost crown her head,
Honour to your porch; bike tires hanging therefrom, each a portal too The Other World, attics in negative colours, massless lecture halls, bars with green beers & thin patrons, streetcars of community unity, libraries without weeping, gnome-grottoes with peas in the wheelbarrows, Turkish baths featuring Friedrich Nietzsche, madhouse calliope tents of unimaginable tarpaulin fury, skies of visible constellated archetype ladders which all eventually fall away,
Your vans gleam in frog-song parked sideways & shivering at the sight of the Officer of The Law,
Fridges offering glimpses of early-Earth algal blooms & a time with no humans with mold in red,
Your women with tiny glasses with amused kinds of smirks—subwoofers falling out of my vocal cords,
Fingerpicking the strands of personal teleology, making love in over-tall rooms— cushions & throw-pillows & candles, or sleeping on the couch, running out for nosh or micturition, listening & wondering, secretly solipsistic with headphones on,
Seeing films and arguing apes against backgrounds of crack alleys & hopeless one- mattress filthy basement occupants returning a year later waving his diploma and
button-down shirt,
Hopeless envious Dylan Thomas reverie in a Tim Horton’s,
And in that end call the trumpet blast on the windows and name the name which dares not be spoken, stuck in the walls and fixtures and cobwebs—trumpet of angel choirs, prefiguring inner light by the light of mosquito lamps chattering in thunderstorms which the ground drank,
Madhouse oscillating cathode-ray hallucinations on your 14-foot ceilings,
Here the total diced vegetable soul of the soup—uncalled but ever-present in rattle of windowpanes, nighttime dream falls, paralyzed fearful awakenings heavy with water droplets on the skin,
Cheeks aglow behind carefully parted brown hair trampling the dust-bunny, sleeping in solitude hoping to skip the entire season but finding comfort in your moldings,
Your cages rattle in the clutter as animals scribble their lives away, rabbits dreaming of the games of carnivores & nature shows proclaiming mice & lemurs tracing spectral arabesques from branch to branch—
Crumbs in the hallway, shelves collapsing back to topsoil, ant Maginot lines, the dominions of spiders mobilized to raid the stocks of apples leaving nothing but pellets of pure dung & the guttural australopithecine wail, howl to lonely & buggered in the blue pixels of dawn crazy—
& so you too will be hollow and your jigs will transmute to synaptic echo soft in memory & stuck in the past, the makeshift ladder for a score of generations happening Here and Now.

Consider: "There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound... Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, air and space..."