In the deserted hospital lobby

A dad asleep with a tv in his lap

His boys leaning in on him

from both sides, watching.

The bloom is off the branches

As life explodes from every corner of our consciousness,

A moment, please,

For the petals of blossoms 

Dropping from the trees.

I myself might not have noticed

Were it not for the antique truck on someone's lawn 

Which I drive by every day -- twice

-- undertaking that part of life you might call routine 

Never noticed it's been parked

under an apple tree this whole time

Struck anew by the sight of it

dusted perfectly with the petals 

of those sweet and fleeting blossoms.

What does it take to cut through 

the trance of living

To feel the life force moving 

Always moving

Today it is a delivery truck from the 1920s

With news for the world

Sitting still in the awesome light of the morning 

A storied and stately bier 

Serenely bearing its diaphanous cargo,

mottled pink/white,

An exquisite garment

without a body

to cover

Long May day's run

Young man

Lying in your mother's arms

You've squeezed two days of living out of this one 

And I've been lucky enough to bear witness to it

The light that took forever to die 

made you feel like you could live

really live 

Forever 

And when you hit your limit 

and the ugliness emerged, an octave higher,

you fought stillness like a delusional sea captain 

like a mean drunk Don Knotts

But eventually you met it, horizontally,

other half of half eaten burg in hand 

And I explained to you 

'Son, you know when the day is coming to an end...'

'It comes back again?' You asked.

'Well,' I said, 'every day is a brand new day, every day we get a new day,
But the day before

Has gone away

For good 

And can never come back

'And so, 

when we are saying goodbye to the day that is ending, but we haven't yet seen

the new day

We can feel sad,

And that is an ok feeling, it's ok to feel that way,'

And before I can tell you it's a gift from God, the whole thing, the full day, the sadness of the end and the innocence and glory of the new day to come, you say,

'All wight, all wight, I'm tiooowd.'

In your mother's arms you experience the joy of goodbye to the day you lived all the way,

Not a moment gone to waste. 

Gonna Change Again and Again

I listen to 'Gonna Change My Way of Thinking' a lot. 

It's a diamond set on the dusty road through Bob Dylan's conversion to Christianity. 

It's a repudiation of the power games, cravenness, violence, persecution, hypocrisy, alienation, self-hatred, and apathy that we meet in this world.

The original version, from 1979's landmark record 'Slow Train Coming', is written and sung by a person who's found the courage to say: the game is rigged: things are not right. 

He revisited the song again in 2003 - as a sketch and duet with gospel legend Mavis Staples. The lyrics are almost completely rewritten as a personal, pastoral shouting blues, backed by a crack band laying out without reservation. 

There's spine-tingling determination in every note: I'm breaking the trance, not gonna be hypnotized anymore. Not by the world outside (1979), and not by my own mind and heart (2003).

Gonna change my way of thinking. Make myself a different set of rules. 

Gonna put my good foot forward,
Stop being influenced by fools.

Many ridiculed him during this 'Christian period'. But whether or not you believe (I happen to), his fearlessness is bracing. 

Anyway, it's hardly an emotion exclusive to Christian belief - or to belief at all: across the denominations, and outside of them, there is wisdom meant to wake us up to what's really happening, in our lives and in the world.

For me the song is a challenge to my smugness in the high times, and a sign of hope when I'm foundering in the shadows. 

It expresses the constant newness available to us if we're willing to believe in - and act for - peace, justice, love, possibility, non-judgment, generosity, reverence for life, and a love of the natural world in which we live. 

Constant, radical renewal.  Gonna change my way of thinking. 

You can do it as many times as you want. Every time you press play. 

Every time you realize you've forgotten. 

Every time something sneaks up on you, falls on you, drops out from under you. 

And every time is the perfect time to do it. Changing it all again today.

Through all this

I thought they had all gone, been consigned to memory, or better, gone away, totally gone, no trace, something you can just let go of, something that sublimates, no need to cling, no need to express, but here they all are, back again, the boat, the blocks, the bottle, the cross, the desire, the pipe, the terrible imagining, the one-liner, the wedding, the wheelchair, the brimming over, the joy, the ease, the anger, the shortness of breath, the garbage, the dirt, the hair, the smell, the cold, the grasping, the gasping, the distance, the deadness, the chasm, the chrism, the shame, the salt, the rain, the road, the field, the past, the pot, the night, the gas, the fish, the bowl, the birds, the cage, paralysis, secrecy, pain, rage, hail, thunder, lightning, morning, missing, disconnection, unity, love, innocence, memory, ragged memory, and the feeling, never really gone away, that I'm going to have to write my way through this.

Holiday's end

When we're together, we may bark, or snip, or growl, but from our little hearth, arm in arm, we meet it all, small dispute or great disaster, the joy that brings tears, and the tears that try to drown the joy. 

And before long we must pick up and go out into our various worlds, which we forget are all one. 

It's easy to feel forlorn, bereft, separated as we may seem to be from our various members, but truly we are no further apart than a planet and its moons, or a river and its source, or a melody and its harmony and its rhythm are. 

And when we come back to each other, we are grateful, so very grateful, that we're reminded of why we yearn for time off together in the first place. Everything begins again.

.

A Tangent

I read an article a while back & got the impression that the Environment Minister isn't comfortable uttering the words 'climate change'. 

Which is strange, because she's from the Arctic. I wonder if it's because the government is not keen on certain kinds of science.

My pal Finley does well working on the oil pipes in Alberta. He welds. The western cities are booming. I hear stories of towns awash in lonesome men with cash. He does it for his family.

I turn on my car and drive to buy things.

I go by Finley's house and wonder 'will he come back before winter?' That makes me think of Four Strong Winds.

When I listen to it, I can hear the bleakness. It gives me shivers. The tear ducts burn. It's like seeing the world from the air. Finley working on the pipes a wayyyy over there. 

Train Engine Bell

The train engine bell

In its urgent, mechanized march

Could raise a panic in me

At one time

It was a summoning of worry

An invocation of concern

A reminder that the beginning of the end was at hand

A clang - clang - clang and you're mine all mine, hand it over, hand it over, I need your heart just to fool 'em again.

A classic submission move

A cadence just quick enough to awaken chemical defenses.

But something seems to have changed

Could it be my way of thinking?

I can pick one CLANG and let it ring

Or speed up the march of the clapper until the bell becomes a great singing bowl, truly singing, ringing true, reverberating, living in the heart, carrying me all at once away and then back to you.

.

Why I Run, pt. 3

Part of the thing with running along the downtown waterfront in T.O. is that you have to negotiate crazybusy traffic arteries and their colossal sentinels, the condo towers, in order to get there. And back.

Near the stadium, on a street called Navy Wharf, (which is NOT a wharf at all) there are a few such condo colossi. 

One in particular is haunted. Not by ghosts, but by memory. 

I remember when Matthew and Adam lived there. My brothers. On the zillionth floor. Not living there because they were jet-setting, BMW-driving, young upwardly mobile downtowners with limited interest in community. 

They probably would have preferred to live perched atop a steep hillside overlooking Davenport Rd., and the rest of the city, as they had before Matthew was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. 

ALS gradually robs you of your physical abilities, while your mind remains lucid. It's a terminal illness for which there is no cure, and limited treatment.

As the condition took hold, Matthew needed flat terrain in order to get in and out of the house. First with his cane, then his walker...and then his wheelchair. This highrise condo rental met that need. Plus it was next door to the Dome, within striking distance of a Jays game. Adam decided to move there with Matthew. 

We were all innocents on the journey, devastated by what was happening to Matthew, but firm in our belief that we could do something. Although he may not have been sure he had a choice, Adam's decision was made, I think, out of deep love, and a profound feeling that he was to be his brother's keeper - a duty, and an honour, that lives in the blood.  

I would visit Matthew one night a week, and we would have sushi. We would talk about a lot of things. Sort things out. Get sad about things. Get defiant. He would show me his artwork. We would watch baseball. I would sleep over there, and walk to work in the early morning.  He kicked me out once for asking a couple of pretty serious questions and demanding an answer.

This was hard. This was a time of losing things, slowly, relentlessly. Matthew was losing things, none of us could imagine what it was like to be him. I felt lost - but even then I didn't know how far adrift I was. I can't speak for anyone else. I've learned the very best thing is to listen.

It's been a few years since they lived at Navy Wharf. Matthew is in his own place, in a real community, and he's in uncharted territory, which might be familiar to him by now. He's now lived longer than the vast majority of people who encounter ALS. Even though he needs assistance to do every single thing, he is very mindful of the concept of independence.

As close as the three of us Foley brothers are, there is a blurry spot deep inside that apartment that I will never resolve. A smudge. I wasn't there. It was Matthew and Adam, both intimately engaged in the struggle. I feel it, in the silence, when I remember. But I can't ever know it. 

See, I jog along Navy Wharf, and things like this come up, but in ONE SECOND, like THAT. Much, much shorter than the time it takes to write or read something like this. 

In another second, I remember Rose, the security guard, who really gave a damn about Matthew, and Adam, and my Mom and Dad, and my family. Sometimes it seemed she was the only one, in that great hulking concrete filing cabinet full of lives and lifestyles. I can see her now, salt and pepper perm behind that slab of a desk, in the lobby, on the ground. 

.

Why I Run pt. 2

I had done an early morning run on the waterfront again. And this time I decided to jog by the Dome. Not around it, but RIGHT BY it, between it and the CN Tower, where I would have to climb a whole bunch of concrete steps. Even though it was the end of my run, and even though I've only just started jogging, so I'm not exactly EnduroMan, I took those damn stairs, two at a time, with a little shuffle-step on the landings all the way.  JUST GAVE'R, y'know? 

By the time I got to the top, my legs were super heavy and I was hoping my heart was still made of strong stuff. But I had done it! 

So I walked along the John St. footbridge over all the railway tracks, tripping on some serious endorphin-induced euphoria. 

About 15-20 young folks were walking toward me along that wide bridge, probably late teens. The girls almost all wearing yoga pants with the legs missing, and tank tops of varying degrees of structural integrity. The boys almost all wore super-brand-new ballcaps.

Two boys were crossing over, moving toward the railing on my side, so I moved toward the middle. Then they split and headed right for me. They were so young you couldn't stick a burr to their faces for lack of stubble. But they knew how to intimidate me. They drew close and one guy said to me 'you got somethin'?

Dammit, these were boys! 

I was out of breath, and just kept moving my lead-weight legs. I shook my head, and mouthed the word 'no' with a smirk that I hoped would hide that I was actually afraid. 

And that was it. They were on to something else, like a couple of cichlids.

I did those stairs like Rocky Balboa, but I was still afraid. But that's OK, because Rocky was afraid too. Right? Right?

Why I Run pt. 1

This morning, I jogged down to the waterfront. As I pulled up at the end of the quay, the sun was a perfect circle flashing orange/purple/pink/yellow at random over and over as it climbed above the ships and warehouses and driving range nets. 

I reached out and plucked it from the middle horizon, popped it back like a pill, and washed it down with some water.

Then I crushed Crushed CRUSHED everything in my path for what seemed like forever but was really only about 20 minutes. I had to get to work. 

The Endorphins Talking?

In summer, you either get into the water or you don't. You can start anything and there's enough room to remake yourself amidst the tall grasses, wild flowers, the industrious and manifold birds. 

Sure, any day, all year, possibility is present, and I like to believe in that as much as the next person, or the person beside them, but if it's July 1 and you're not hustling in the service of some new regimen, embracing some novel perspective, or challenging yourself to break out of assumptions and into the far broader meadow of meaning, well, then. That's your business.

But it's well and truly summertime, and I am jogging. Or, I've gone jogging three times.

I've also decided I'll try not to think the worst of people, alive and dead, beloved and less-admired. 

I know I'll stumble, ache, grouse, and piss and moan. But the alternative --carrying on along the concrete walk, making all the right turns, never getting wet, never brushing against the seaweed, never spotting water-snakes, or getting a wave in the mouth, never panting, sweating, pounding the ground, not challenging routine or conditional thought, and never picking up and holding a mirror to complacency - is depressing, disheartening,  terrifying.

I must keep this handy.

Pillows

Luggage. Baggage.

I see it all, from the overnight bag to the space age 4-wheelers you can wheel up right beside you. Some people look like they've got a LOT. Two old suitcases, one on wheels, and a box taped shut. And a cloth shopping bag. And purse. Going to Windsor in an hour or so. For a long time? Forever?

More than anything, I love the sight of a person traveling with a pillow. Tucked under the arm. In inclement weather it might be jammed in a garbage or department store bag. But it's nicest exposed, tucked under. Or better, embraced, in front, by the two free arms of a backpack-wearer.

It's an ordinary object with an extraordinary task. Cushioning and caressing the head, the container of awareness, ostensible commander of our bodies, keeper of dreams, repository of tears, of smiles, of twinkling eyes, hopes, ideas, good deeds. Mistakes, lies, key plays, brave phrases, vulnerabilities encased in bone. Memory, ancestry. Our existence & our remains.

Carrying a pillow through the streets and into the station and onto the train is not just about getting this object from A to B. It's an act of intimacy, an admission of humanity, an expression of solidarity. A reminder of all the things I've been carrying and how I lay me down.

May 13 'round 6

Like a giant followspot fired up
& trained on the prostrate actor

A bedside lamp suddenly lit
by the one charged with awakening

The sun itself pulls me from sleep in the cradle of the train.

After a split-second of indignant 'whaaa-?'

The most beautiful truth is realized: I have been roused by nothing less than the rising sun itself.

I can drift back into slumber, let it illuminate the eyelids

Imagine a bed of foraged things
& light falling across the mouth of the cave.

Coolness

I'm not cool

never have been.

Often tried.

Never really pulled it off

& if I ever did, would I know?

What would be left?

I must think it's important

or else why feel so bereft?

Pigeons & Sausage

The pigeons have destroyed the bun.

But they can't make any headway on the sausage, with its tough casing and its trademark curve. It rocks and leaps and spins around from sidewalk to gutter as they peck and peck and peck.

Sometimes as many as ten of the grubby grey birds are going at it, with agitated, muffled cooing in their throats. The sounds escalate to an untoward hooting. Necks are strained. Most of them give up and walk away. A couple of believers carry on a while. Then a mob forms again. Still, the dessicated, dirty sausage writhes, uncompromised.

They can all smell victory; a breakfast to rival the best corn anyone's ever cast before them. If pigeons had saliva (do they?) it would be dragging in globs from their bills. But they just can't tear the casing, taste the spices, can't catch a break.

If one of them gets a foot on it, holds it down, then everybody eats.

It becomes the stuff of pigeon lore, passed down through generations:

The wondrous spark in one bird's brain, a proud, firm stance, chest puffed out, knee bent, gaze fixed on the horizon, talon gripping the ragged meat, the whole family, cousins and cousins once removed, all feasting. The missing link.

When The Train Pulls Up

To the deserted station

In the dark

There are so few of us I recognize everyone

Like the guy standing RIGHT on the EDGE of the platform

Right on the yellow line!

He turns his back when the train comes

Pushing air ahead of it

And he takes the brunt of the gust

In all weather. I don't know why!

Most of the time I'm just worried he'll cough wrong and fall so I don't really look.

But today I just didn't think of it - what am I, his Dad? No.

I just stared at him

Had room to re-realize: we are immersed in fluid.

Standing in a sea of air

That goes in and out, sustains, inflates.

Our stories, conflicts, concerns, calculations, insults, embraces, all float around in it.

We are in a great container full of it.

We forget all the time.

Empty Stockings, or Just a Minute on The Night Before Christmas

In the morning, the stockings are always full of something, whether it's all we could scrape together, or just the tip of an iceberg of booty. Could be soap and socks and chocolate. A big navel orange lodged stubbornly in the toe. Could be coal. Dreaded coal! Or whatever. They're full.

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care. Empty stockings. No sooner do we picture the stockings hung than we're hit with the hopes that St. Nicholas soon will be there. In fact, their emptiness isn't even mentioned. We just figure they're empty. Why would anyone put up a full stocking? But come now. We have no time to think on this, because we are distracted by, prisoner to, totally wrapped up In Hopes that St. Nicholas Soon Will Be There. Dammit!

O, call it the excitement and anticipation of a Christmas Eve if you will, but - if you care - we've missed something. We've missed the exquisite emptiness of that foot-shaped, gaudy, felt or velvet or woolen ornament nailed up - or hung from shiny, mantle-saving, weighted custom brass hooks. Never meant to be worn, only to be filled.

Before something can be filled, it must be emptied. And we're full. Full of thoughts, desires, fears, memories, intentions, stories, worries, strategies, lists, shames, triumphs past, and losses to come. Full of wanting, needing, grasping, avoiding, conniving, wishing, praying, bargaining, using, reaching, spinning...you get it. We're full.

The stockings, hung by the chimney with care, are empty.

And somehow, in the dead of night, they're filled.

Legend has it that our actions through the year dictate the contents. Tradition holds that we get what we need, with a deluxe old-world twist: New mittens, warm socks. Soap. A tiny book of Oscar Wilde quotations. That Orange. The contemporary sensibility has room for some astonishing bauble, or electronic device. Now that's full.

And the stockings are emptied again.

They're laid in the box with the creche and the garland, the books and the lights, and they wait.

No, wait. They don't wait. They lie still.

They are emptied. Maybe they will again be filled.

Train yesterday/today

Yesterday morning, the traincar was all stillness, like a temple lumbering over the rails, like a body of water that has never known agitation.

Today, it is all motion, inside and out; a den of idiosyncrasy:

A man speaking awful fast about new fibre optic TV

A woman who tears the newspaper, long and luxuriously, over and over, as if everything is fascinating

A right snoring fellow, short enough to lay himself flat out on the seats, startling with his snorts

This lady loves her dentist, hates her hygenist

This guy's coughs are classic cigarette + chest cold & may only lift in May

And remarkably, I'm drifting along in peace over all of it, banana peel draped over my thigh, unopened yogurt in dangling hand, part of the fresco, nodding off myself

Letting the glorious machine run all the way downtown in its vivid completeness.

In the evening, two dudes sit facing one another, each with a hot, fragrant pail of poutine, and I feel like asking them:

Where were you guys this morning?

The U.S. Election: What Is The 6th?

Today, I turn 38. And they're going to the polls down south to elect a President.

A few work colleagues and I wondered about my birthday + US Presidential election history, and honestly I didn't know a lot about it. 

So, in the spirit of the day, I dug up a few things (with the help of Wikipedia).

Since 1848, the beginning of single US Presidential election dates across all states...here's what's happened in Presidential elections falling on November 6:
 
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln, R, beat three opponents for his first election as President. Momentous, and a watershed moment for the United States and its practice of slavery...a trigger for southern secession and eventual civil war. 
 
1888, Benjamin Harrison, R, defeats incumbent Grover Cleveland, D, in the electoral college...but Cleveland won the Popular Vote! And would be back! This election formed the backdrop for the 1968 Disney musical film 'The One And Only Original Family Band!' Eh? Songs by the Sherman brothers? Yeah.
 
1900, William McKinley, R, re-elected, over William Jennings Bryan, D. Bryan was unsuccessful in his second attempt to beat McKinley, who would be assassinated the following September, in Buffalo, as the old 'White House Blues' goes.

1928, Herbert Hoover, R, beats Al Smith, D. Al Smith's Big Problem? Anti-Catholic sentiment. There was apparently a current of paranoia that if Smith won the White House, the Pope would come and rule the US from a fortified location in Washington. Whoooa!
 
1956 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, R, beats Adlai Stevenson, D, earning re-election. A rematch of 1952 - and the most recent rematch to this day. They still liked Ike. (Sorry, couldn't resist)
 
1984 - Ronald Reagan, R, re-elected by a landslide over Walter Mondale, D. Reagan won the biggest total of electoral votes of any Presidential candidate (525 out of 538).
 
...and that brings us to...today.

If Barack Obama wins re-election, he'll be the first Democrat to notch a Presidential election victory on a November 6th. So there's that.

But the 6th is, after all, just the 6th.

What is a pattern?

Anything can happen.

I could be born, an unimagined soul, alongside countless others.

An entire country could take a step toward a widely-imagined future.

We'll read tea leaves, blow out candles, and carry on.