LYKOEIA

LYKOEIA

Lykoeia.

The howling of wolves.

Venting the agony in the wasteland

of nightclubs, bars, jails, parking lots

in the grubby all night greasy spoons

with the pizza oven in the window

and a heavy snow falling outside

at three in the morning

when the ghouls like us were out

like afterhours carnies from the Ex

the hooker in the corner

the pervert in another

the dealer in a booth in the middle

and hot camera for sale

by a drunk in another

who isn’t ever sure of where or who he is.

And the Mexican restaurants where we were banned

permanently for life twice

because no body drank as much as us

and our outrageous bullshit was good for business.

And everybody knew how difficult it was

to be an alcoholic artist those days

and get some really good work done

that never pays much

until after your dead

and everybody puts your picture up on the wall

and thinks of it as a signal honour

you got arrested first in their restaurant.

You didn’t live in the big homey

awkward cheap rent run-down houses of the Glebe

before it was gentrified back then

by the real estate agents who crashed our parties

to entice our women away,

property for property,

you encamped, tribally.

Parties ran from house to house

like waterclocks of booze

and every fourth bucket of a house

had a porch and a beached whale of a couch

you could sit out on in the dark with a candle all night

and listen to the music coming from the back of the house

and three doors up the street

with a toke, and a girl

who thought

as you let the story of your life in art

drift off into the cool night air thematically

like smoke from the end of the spliff in your hand

you were a wickedly dangerous genius

who could only be saved from himself

if he took her beauty and her pain

and her body to bed for a muse.

Lykoeia.

The howling of wolves

like a displaced tribe of Sioux among the Seminoles

lamenting the only holy war path left to them

was the longest way home,

venting their agony

in a self-abusive wilderness

of longing, madness, and aspiration.

Ferocious false starts to damaged careers

as a litmus test of who was sincere or not

as we ran our tongues along the razor’s edge

of the things that we would say

and the things that we would not

and the things we would do

that we were willing to bleed for

to prove we were crazy enough

to be who we said we were

even in absentia.

Singers, poets, painters, mimes

and the wannabe agents

and mythically inflated producers,

the editors, publishers, girlfriends

trying to con a candle into a constellation

so they could be as important and controlling

as a contract with a bad ear.

And I still very much doubt

if there’s any more murder

in a terrorist cell

than there is in a room

that’s just given birth to a new poetry mag

and all the editors claiming paternity

are arguing among themselves

for equal visiting rights to the baby

even before it’s out of the incubator.

Nightfall over the city

and the stars no brighter over the capital

than they were over Toronto and Montreal

but something colonial and sinister

about the way the ass-kissing

quislings and collaborators

thought they were dimmer somehow

and wheeled Toronto into their poetic agendas

like the Trojan horse through the gates of Ottawa.

So many sleepwalking through the snow

talking to themselves

as if they had a pillow over their mouths

they could scream through

or dream

as it dawned on them in the streetlights

outside a negligent poetry reading

things are often as true as they seem

and how hard it is,

what a lonely brutal discipline it is

to try and convince the moon you’re wounded

when you’re only bleeding for poetic effect

to howl with the wolves

so crazed by the lunacy of what they longed for

and knew was so utterly unattainable

even the echo of what they asked for

wouldn’t be given back

when they broke off the engagement

to the coyote pack that practised

mimicking their derangement

as if to feel that way

were creatively stimulating

and not self-destructively real.

Snarling backwards thirty years later,

raising an ear,

baring a fang to the past

as if it were a crucial snake pit

in my formative years,

trying to weave the downed powerlines

in an ice storm of broken chandeliers

into paradigmatic creatively visual

magical mystery tour flying carpets

bejewelled with my tears

that so many now are as threadbare as crosswalks

at the corner of Bank and Fifth

laid like welcome mats

for the public to wipe their feet on

before the revolving doors of aesthetic perception.

But it’s as hard to turn

the memory of a bad acid trip

it took years to come down from

into a flying carpet

that’s going to sell as well

as a genie’s latest line of touch lamps

where you only have to clap once

when you enter a room

like the light coming out of the darkness

and your reputation’s

made in the shade for a lifetime

until it gets real dark

and the full moon breaks out above the city

and the wolves begin to howl

and all up and down the Valley

from Ottawa to Kingston you can hear

the dogs, the cowed dogs, begin to whine

like a Japanese two stroke

compared to the big-hearted snarl of a bad Harley

with a throttle for a throat

with all the bridges it’s ever crossed

burning in a quarter ounce aluminum rear view mirror

with a big heart-shaped gas tank

metal-flaked in cherry red

full of fire and freedom and tears

that would rather wipe out honestly

on the newly gravelled dirt road ahead

than the black ice

of the treacherous highway behind it

that’s been unravelling like a snake with its head cut off

for light years.

PATRICK WHITE