A Death in Toronto
on a raft of vegetation,
like a man without a nation;
like a grounded man without his amps;
adrift with lonesome concubeens
love's wikipedya in their jeans!
I count the steps to Jarvis Street,
I count them once again;I count the cracks of brother's grave
I count from one to ten:
My friends are all in prison,
my family's a mutation
restrained within the prison bonds
and psychiatric observation.
Toronto's atmosphere electric:
madness of the Congee Queen,
lingual delights of Indochine;
I am the green wire marked "to ground",
everything changes, nothing's the same,
a cityscape of palette flame!
----
notes
My sister-in-law had cancer surgery and we wait for 3 weeks for all the results.
Toronto begins to weary me: in 25 or more years, I have been able to stay with friends and/or family exactly once. I am so sorry for their pain. We get through life the best we can. Some of us wear our wounds for many years - like the Fisher King. But the result is not a whole lot of family and friends getting together one heck of a lot.
concubeen = concubine
Congee is a form of chinese cuisine. My niece says they make a soup and rice balls and "dump" different flavors into it; this is after she dragged us to the Congee Queen a couple years ago, singing its praises, while we wondered why this was supposed to be so good.
I remember my first hitch-hike to TO; I was barely 20 years old. We were let out on the 401 and wandered down Yonge. We stayed somewhere... maybe Dale Avenue off Castle Franck, maybe not. I remember being on The Danforth, The Mortimer, and The Dawes.
Sunnybrook Hospital was randomly built in the 60's? The elevation seems to be high and it is windier and colder there than at Don Mills and York Mills - the Weston - or even the Donway, which I used to think got pretty cold. Everything in TO is a micro-climate determined by elevation and the winnowing and funneling of the buildings and their shape and height.
The complex was built before central air, so there is a large crop of window a/c's stuck into the facades like skin tags. They charge the concerned relatives $8 per hour to park. I parked back by the day care, called the "Something Creche". There is a petite cube of walls and roof for some sort of psychiatric program next to it; they are both perilously close to the steep ravine, at the bottom of which may be the eponymous Sunnybrook: it was a smallish brook, indeed.
2 comments:
So sorry about your sister-in-law. I hope all will be well. My MIL was just diagnosed last week, will have a lumpectomy soon and hopefully that's it. We just celebrated one year of my nephew's marriage to a woman who was diagnosed last year and had a complete mastectomy and reconstruction. Now she's working up to running half marathons.
My goodness, humans are something.
I mean, just look at language, and how you use it.
I hope all is and will be well by you and yours.
Yes, humans are something indeed. They are so unusual in reality, even though when we discuss them in sociology and economics we try to make them seem so mundane.
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