2.

This snowball smells like expired aspirin
with diesel upchuck copperhead breath--
but then what?

I wish Captain Beefheart
had played more clarinet,
the terrible headaches I would get
after parties from being at
them too long, through orange streets
to the 7-11--plume of vapour heat
in the cold Adanac back room
digitally added with optical zoom--
On Lok tap running closed tight
walking through a big stripe
across Victoria & Hastings a big red stripe
oh its bad in this kind of thing
when the opera lady starts to sing
& it goes all sepia, an ocarina
hand a sandstone screen,
a quarter inch of pink snow
cast iron stumps where though
they'd taken railings away for the war
Dad said we still paid & paid
getting it back in the form of blades
& Starfighters, well into the decade. 

Lend-lease. The price of peace.
People that had figured out,
ways to make money, to tout.
To spiv.  Cut your hand on his
wing collar, you could.
A mustache behind, a hood
a brothel creeper, a secret weeper.
A solid ten per cent
his demob suit rent.

Thus from the stage of the Commodore
the Captain turned & said

Read Wyndham Lewis
Apes of God! Apes of God!

meaning, I guess, that even
the over-egged & overdrawn
grotesque dreadnoughts
blundering bitterly through
the baking heyday pages
of the Torquemada modernism
I'm glad I missed
are more interesting
than you assholes--
I'm going to go home & paint!

But the Commodore bathroom
is everywhere, they only
pretend to stamp your hand
a pot flung into your face
half-amusingly
forever--never
a good town for crowds

they just up & leave you lonely
rather than bringing
the audience home
rather than just going home.