Pan down Cleve Street, Café El Patio
Neil Young and Rick James mainlining
Music like you’ve never seen guitar and hipster-kool
All those dreamy riffs power verses curving
Duke Redbird’s eloquence rooted in the land
down Hazelton Lane, Lightfoot whispers
Sylvia & Ian Tyson, a mood away
Folk, before folk was young
Cobble stoned streets and laneways huddle
With roomers too eager to accept free love
Like a panhandler’s loot
Crawling all over time like there was
Never a clock or calendar invented
Time lived as easily as one should
Servant, not master
Let the building build themselves
Let the City managers go to their stinking boring lives
We will take their children and turn them
Into freedom lovers, make them babble
And inhale holy grass.
Not far from the Riverboat
Buffy Saint Marie grooves inditements
soldiering-on universally, calling us awake
As Joni Mitchell grooms flower-power
tuning strings in Vera’s rooming house
readying to burn vocal tracks at the Penny Farthing
At the Bohemian Easy, Dan Hill’s afro stood out
Margaret Atwood, bp Nichol, Gwendolyn McEwen
carving worlds out from the old
David Donell already gone rouge
Michael Ondaatje’s awkward tongue
finding the two Billys
Billy da Kid and Billy da Holliday, that is
bp channels Bissett; ‘piss on it, we’ll free the syllable
Liberate it from its puritan hell!’
Poets making a joyful wave and foaming at the mouth
New voices, new-new voices, something wonderfully lush
New meaning to Canadian
This land, rich with raw rounding words
Flying out of skin
Shocking and comforting and at home all at once
– community
Although many have dreamt of exotic shores
And came on boats and planes from fog
Or their parents did
yes, your parents did
‘cause this land is promise
This land, this land.
trampled and stolen
swollen like a kept woman’s song
That was how we freed ourselves to be ourselves
With language storming the barricades
language flaming in our hands