LAST TOKE OF THE NIGHT

LAST TOKE OF THE NIGHT

Last toke of the night.

Last cigarette.

Last coffee.

Thinks with his kind of luck

they’ll put a no smoking sign behind him

while he’s blindfolded

in front of a firing squad.

He takes the garbage out

at three in the morning,

puts his one seaweed green plastic bag

next to five others

from the insurance brokerage downstairs

leaning up against a one-eyed parking meter.

Desolate small town November streets.

The red coat Scotiabank

glares at him like a U-boat in Halifax Harbour.

One drunk moving from door way to doorway

like a waterclock from bucket to bucket

as if they were all connected in his mind somehow

in series, not parallel.

Abandoned things, leafless trees,

a bad hair day for the flowers

down in the dumps

with their municipally rustic whiskey barrels.

He remembers learning several summers ago

if you put the flame of a zippo

under the petals of the petunias

they change colour better than a mood ring

and more melodramatically than a rejected adolescent.

Deep Persian blues

freaked with celestial Chinese greens

that almost made him believe at the time

that a petunia must have been a peacock in another life.

Waste, litter, leaves, traffic lights

swaying in the wind

like a trainman with a lantern down the line

trying to slow things they have no effect upon down.

Stop. Go. Pause.

The magic is gone.

Nothing moves the way it should.

The train starts mourning from a long way off

like a dog that’s lost its master.

Space is laid out like a Nazdac runway

with omnidirectional perspective

but no one’s taxied up to the tower yet

to ask for permission to take off.

He looks up.

Jupiter.

Just past zenith, southwest

of the Alley Cats Bowling sign and gym.

He lives above and one apartment down

from the narrow tunnel into the courtyard

of the old coach house where the horse culture of Perth

used to stable their overexuberant buggies.

Past the gold and soot coloured mailboxes

that look like they’ve been in a plane crash

and were waiting to be reassembled

as soon as the mailman can find the flight recorder

in the right black box.

Through three doors

up one worn flight of stairs

through an unpainted veneer and cardboard door

down a long haul past a gas furnace and a coatrack

he returns to his private chaos

nebulous with insomnia

as the counter-intuitive nemesis

of overexhaustion and the last of the good bud.

Last toke of the night.

Last cigarette.

Last coffee.

Over and over and over again

like a mantra looking for oblivion.

Nada. Nada. Not enlightenment.

He thinks of an Irish bank teller he likes

because she scares and excites him

with the possibility of her beauty and darkness.

He looks at last year’s masterpiece

propped up in the silence above his desk

but one look at his eyes

and it’s said all it’s going to say to him tonight.

Which leaves the lamps for late night conversation

but they’re about as scintillating as the coma he’s in.

The air in the room

one long pregnant pause

before the crack of dawn or doom

or whichever comes first,

he watches his mind like landfill

for any sign of his corpse.

The darkened see-through coffin of his aquarium

worthy of Napoleon or Lenin lying in state

to see the lineaments of greatness stone cold dead

where his goldfish recently died

like the Bolshoi Ballet or a comet

with an urgent dispatch for the sun

who killed the messenger as soon as it arrived.

He would have buried him at sea

for the sailor he was

but all he had was a toilet at the time

and no flag to wrap him in but cellophane.

No twenty-one gun salute.

Just the salvo of a thin gas chimney pipe

warming up like shallow heavy metal.

The indignity at the end always hurts worse

than the broken promise of a false start

but such is life he tells himself

without really knowing what he’s agreeing to.

PATRICK WHITE