POEMS

Returning home from London for a brief visit in 1975, with a small Canada Council grant awarded to help me scope out theatre across the country, I crashed for a few nights on a friend’s floor in Montreal. I needed to hit the road early for a five hour drive to Toronto to make an appointment to meet Bill Glasco at the Tarragon Theatre. Neither she nor I had an alarm clock. She offered her avocado plant to overhang my head as I slept on the floor. Twenty years later I puzzled about that awakening.

Judit and I left Berlin in the Spring of 1971 driving a red VW bus, a former Berlin Fire Department ambulance we had bought at an auction. Taking a long circuitous route to London. That summer the red bus was our travelling cocoon on an amazing European summer journey…look at the shaggy, greasy hair on that Guy, yuck! A total Geek. What did that beautiful woman ever see in me? The snows of yesteryear, melted to a non-recoupable past?

Loukes Lake a water access only lake in North Kawartha. Our cabin, the family retreat, is our family health-care plan. Swimming the lake for the kids has been a rite of passage. Written long after the break-up with her mother, obviously.

For K.

Ya, Bertolt Brecht, my hero. After reading Fuegi’s book, “Brecht and Co.” I over-reacted with this poem. I will confess, in hindsight, I am embarrassed by what I wrote in my Gazette review of the book, Mack The Shark. I now feel the book skews the assembled facts in a malignant attempt at character assassination. Possibly though, even likely, some of my poem is valid.

2009 I suffered the final breakup of a disjointed relationship. No amount of trying, from either of us, was ever going to get that partnership to work. The confused emotions of a doomed conjunction laid the ground, readied me, unexpectedly, two years later, for a union more sane, where friendship and passion could feed each other……

For the musical accompaniment of Will Wat? (LINK) I scrounged a damaged bell from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. (Where the Philadelphia Liberty Bell was struck!) Also an anvil from a local blacksmith. And I built a drum from a wooden 48 gallon wine barrel…

Assia De-Vreeze, founder and builder of the National Theatre School Library, was an important figure in the lives of many NTS students/graduates. A half-Russian, half-German refugee from war-torn Europe. A human being of almost mythical stature. Assia flew to Moscow so she could be the rehearsal translator for my Russian production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pushkin Theatre, Moscow. She features in Hot Ice, the director’s diary of that adventure. Dear Assia…

The fruits of a Plateau café encounter help repair a Self shredded by a failed longer-term relationship that had been a painful ripping away of many illusions. F. invited me to be part of her bouquet of lovers. Like the flowers in the poems, the affair was an annual not a perennial and did not regenerate when the summer was over. A short rebound Affair, that did not end well.

A hopeless worship, inappropriate and, luckily, never consummated.

Life must be lived as an aesthetic experience, pace Nietzsche. We must treat the everyday as a stage. We all have to learn to act, to find the inspiration to deliver a performance as we are experiencing. (“perezhivanie” as Konstantin Stanislavski terms it.)

Living back in Montreal. The two younger kids have moved here too. Oldest one lives in Toronto with her mother. Money is tight.

She tried to teach me to Tango…good luck.

Finally, a partnership that lasts longer than all the others put together. Having arrived somewhere, poems get less needful to be written.

F. stalked me for a month in the Greek café where I had my coffee most mornings. Sensing the prison of my profound unhappiness, she honed in on me, even occupying my preferred chair in the café before I could get to it, to make sure she caught my attention. In the end I succumbed. —Thanks, F. you helped me escape my emotional dungeon.

We all profess to want it. Are we able to recognize it if it bumps into us?

Hmmm… wrote this about 2009. Trying to understand if I can/will actually ever be able to build a lasting partnership with anyone,

Early ’90’s suicidal thoughts. Writing poems seems to have successfully helped me avoid the act.

1992 I have rented a room in an apartment with three other flat mates … one of them liked to knock on my door early mornings.

Likely a lonely New Year’s eve in the early 2000’s

A nasty break-up…. and the child suffers.

After the 1990 Highjacking of the Canadian Stage Company cracked the foundation of my Being, I lived a schizophrenic existence between Montreal and Toronto. Written around the same time as Chasing Myself and shares a few lines with the latter poem.

A rush of adrenaline goes through your brain as you contemplate suicide. Don’t think I ever came too close to pulling off self-murder…I had many plays I still wanted to direct, and three kids that have plenty of issues of their own without having to deal with the trauma of a father who… But the confusion is compulsive, enthralling…

The Fitting Rings (2008)

A supplication for a cup of coffee after She broke up with me, on the eve of a trip to China. In retrospect She can’t be blamed. We could have, should have handled our problems differently. I mean what fool would ever want to be with me? At the airport I insisted we take off our rings, I would keep them safe while She was gone. Made sense to me. She had initiated the breakup. Not a happy scene. In retrospect I hope She factors in my pain and forgives me.