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I was walking west on the south side of Queen Street at 06:00 noticing torn up fragments of plastic flowers and foliage along the sidewalk. Following the refuse to the Don River bridge I found the remains of a monument.
It was directly over the south bound right hand lane of the Don Valley Parkway.
As I watched, leaning over the railing, every driver avoided the blood stained pavement.
I had planned to walk to Cherry Beach and watch the sunrise but, I took the path on the right towards uptown Toronto.
The path led me to The Distillery District where, during the American prohibition, hard liqueur was made.
I danced and marched on the empty lanes and paths to the sounds of the Carlos Santana Band coming to me through ear buds.
Until...
I came upon the exact same old truck I drove during the harvest of 1967 as an off road cowboy trucker.
It was a duel axle dump truck for loading grain on the move beside combines, hauling it out of the fields, and dumping it into an auger which lifted it into a granary... where I shoveled it out to the corners.
I was drivin' truck during the day and playin' music at night. We got a notice that summer in TIME magazine as "The Down to Earthenware Jug Band".
Ode to Billy Joe McAllister was my favourite song on the truck radio. My high school sweetheart had dumped me in the spring, just before final exams, and I was feelin' pretty melancholy when I wasn't working hard and playin' harder.
When I completed harvesting I left by train, in the day coach, for Montreal and Sir George Williams University (YMCA); enrolled for first year in the first school I liked
assigned as student to
my mentor
Roy Kiyooka
who had spoken
for me
before the entrance committee
he was aligned to our old school
out west
and I was set in place
down east
they called him a
colour field painter
he was a transformer
poet to painter to sculptor
to conceptualist
to poet, always a poet
he liked my idea
these cosmic-comic-blog-blob-ebooks, billy
he called it
hypertext poetry
visual poetry
are like Haiga which
Roy told me
I was telling myself
to explore
as he had done in
text and print
pictures and words
click or touch
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