MariaMary

I mention the club in this poem:

July 20 1982
Scuttling up Yonge before dawn

the morning of my twenty-seventh birthday,

my accomplishments to date,

a filing cabinet full of manuscripts

and rejection notices.

I have driven hack and cleaned vomit

from stifling halls while King Tut’s death mask

looked on with a smile,

I have parachute-panted in Voodoo’s

and held court

beneath spray-painted prophecies.

I have been laid in Anglicans woods

by a woman I never met again,

I have walked streets littered with roses

scattered under after-hour crowds

on my way to booze-can dance floors

overflowing with musicians, dealers,

groupies, strippers and sundry flotsam like me.

But now with the moon hours from predawn,

clearing clouds in the tunnel of downtown

I pass the archway of stone

that stands inexplicably at the mouth of McGill,

the women’s club a few row houses in:

I’d once been a guest inside with a Halloween Butterfly.

North of Wood Street, two jean-jacketed headbangers

from Scarberia wade through junk strewn about Yonge – he

in an AC/DC t-shirt and she in one claiming

‘And on the 8th Day God created Led Zeppelin’

– although I can’t help but doubt it.

A copy of the Plain Truth magazine sprawls

with an empty bottle of wine in a doorway.

A transvestite sits with a male, dwarf-punk prostitute

on the steps of the Country Style Donuts

eating French crullers.

In the always-open Super Duper Sub Shop

the guy with the eternally greasy ponytail is working.

“If you like Genesis you’ll love Myth”

claims the poster outside the Gasworks;

‘Save Daily on Supermarket Specials’

answers the ad on the Star box.

I turn off Yonge preparing myself for the way

the leaves on the trees will animate

the final play of twilight,

instead I come across two cats gutter-coupling.

Dawn pales into rolling clouds piling up

on the distinctly planetary horizon.

My door closes behind me with a click

that no on hears but me, and Atlas,

stained glassed into the mythos of its window.

Before eventual sleep, there is a call from my brother

salvaging the last vestiges of my optimism with small talk.