I was going to throw it in the garbage anyway.
I don’t even like applesauce.
Had no idea where it came from.
But I didn’t have anything else to give him.
Nothing in my cupboards.
My fridge was empty.
I had half a bottle of sparkling water and cranberry juice.

Eggs. Butter. A carton of milk.

That was it.

I don’t eat a lot—
don’t care for food.

People tell me I'm too skinny.

I need to put more meat on my bones.
But not too much.

A nice, healthy amount,
firm,
but with no artificial flavours.

I couldn’t care less about how it’s attached to my bones.

It’s how they’re butchered, though. Chopped to bits,
all these gentle cows, these poor, gentle pigs.

Chickens. Sheep.

Like us.

I feel for them, for the man living in the park,
for all this life, for the vegetables and flowers too.

Picked. Cut. Hacked. Chewed.

These sentient sun-screamers,
vanishing, for what?

I wanted to puke thinking about it,
all those lips greasy with food,
licking,
sopping it all up,
wiping mouths while he starves.

Like I’m some saint.

Trundling to work like everyone else.

Serving people carefully choosing from a menu—
depending on their generosity.

Feeling low, dissatisfied, disillusioned.

They ask about ingredients,
complain there wasn’t enough of this
or too much of that.

Silverware and coffee cups rattle in my brain.

Mouthfuls glistening with food.

“Excuse me.”
“Yes.”
“Can I …”
“Of course.”

Of course you can.

I always nod and smile,
wondering how I ended up doing this to pay my rent,
wishing I could go back to those summer days,
riding my bicycle on the narrow sidewalks,
circling around the same stretches of concrete dandelions,
past candy stores,
in the early nineties
with all those old men pushing lawn mowers,
slicing all those supple leaves of grass like Whitman, all now
long
gone
dead and buried—

wishing I could join them

some days

like lines in poems
atop
a pile of sundry syllables
slipping
low upon
the floor
into
another alliterative day,
grinding away like meat,
making all that unhappiness in the streets.

I want to be happy.

I wished I could climb to it
as if it were hanging above a toilet
where I can grasp an overhead pipe
and swing myself completely up and sit there and say,

Zing. You did it, Ryan!

I hate hunger.

Sometimes I don’t want to eat,
I’d rather spoon out my own flesh.

It lingers,
though,
and turns us all
into something undesirable—

you know and I know it’s true.

We’re all the same.

Like polished gloom,
swallowing nouns, chomping
on verbs, caught up in the
punctuation, dangling
like sharp hooks,
tearing from one another’s teeth
the leftovers,
churning, breaking down
all this imperfect vocabulary.

Where was I?‍

Ah, the day—
the day I brought applesauce to the man living in the park.

I wasn’t sure what to bring to him.

I wished I could have given him the world, served in a large bowl,
plopped on the table with mounds of whipped cream.

I knew I’d waited too long,
watching him out there in the cold,
suffering, thinking of him, but doing nothing to help him out.

I decided I was going to bring him something to eat.

I figured it had to be soft because he had no front teeth.

Plus, the applesauce was also all I had to give.

Simple. Mass-produced. Nourishment.

I’d wondered about him since the first time I pulled the curtains back in November,
when I saw movement among the leaves and could discern a thin,
sunken face, scurrying around a tent,
tormented, while all the splendour in the city never listened to his sigh.

I wondered what his name could be.

I still do.

I will always know him as Mr. Applesauce.

I saw the applesauce sitting on the side door of my empty fridge.
I checked the expiration date to make sure it hadn’t spoiled.

2008 03 19

It hadn’t.

I thought about the hunger swarming like rats in his body,
gnawing,
rummaging through his skin,
hanging from him like apples on trees,
mashed into sauce,
soon to be
offered at his grave
under the Elm where he sleeps in Grange Park
in that navy tent
long before all the encampments began springing up everywhere
from Trinity-Bellwoods to the Hamilton Harbour
to so many Canadian parks
and North American streets
across the so-many-so sad scenic walks

today

piling

up

on

front lawns.

It was nearing the end of January.

The restaurant in Yorkville I worked at was dead.

I spent most of my shifts polishing cutlery,
leaning on the counter,
wanting to press my fingers into my temples,
stuck between the compact thickness of the walls surrounding me,
scribbling thoughts in my notebook about the beautiful sunshine
the world might not see again.

It was hell.

It was like waking from a bad dream and entering another.

Sometimes I visualized myself
pricking my finger with a needle just to feel alive.

Sometimes I did.

I got home late last night from work.
I had to serve the owner.
He isn’t friendly.

Or kind.

Never says, thank you.

He owns a restaurant and boutique hotel in Yorkville.
Condos along the waterfront.
Bars on King and Queen.
A market in Leslieville.
An apartment building on Eglinton Avenue East.
A bakery in Parkdale.
A car dealership in York Mills.

And a section of the moon.

I never saw him smile,
not once,
even when he sucked the brûlée off his spoon,
or slurped his coffee
and talked about how good his money was,
how he can pay his way through life,
pay his way out of hunger,
leaving empty plates at tables.

I was jealous.

Perhaps I wanted it all, too.

He didn’t know about the man sleeping in the tent in Grange Park.

He looks at me like I’m a bum.
Or a thief.

It was my day off.
It was still quite early.

I stared at the shallow facades,
this cluster of construction,
the trees, laden with winter’s linen,
white as my warm sheets I knew he didn’t have.

A few art students clomped along
to their classes at OCAD.

Sparrows. Pigeons.

A young couple, their dog.

Stray cats.

And shadows.

I looked above the Art Gallery of Ontario
and saw a patch of blue sky shaped like a manatee
swallowing a ditch,
a bridge, a hump of hill,
the applesauce and then the nameless man in his tent,
wrapped around a curtain he found in a back alley,
clinging to it like a comma,
death deep in his hollow sockets,
dreaming of roasting a rabbit on a fire.

The manatee disappeared.

I needed more sleep.

The clouds shifted like a thread of thoughts.

It was so cold out,
I decided I was going to bring him a blanket too.  

I ran a hot bath.

I then sat down in the tub,
hugged my knees,
closed my eyes,
deeply appreciating how nice the hot water felt,
knowing how cold it was outside,
how unfair it was that people had to sleep on the streets
like human leftovers,

scraped from the plate,
but how here I was

soaking my bones,
not out in the wheezing streets of Toronto,
being whipped around by the wind,
sleeping under an icy moon with trees and city shrieks that rattle at night.  

Why was I one of the lucky ones?

I will never know.

I rested with my eyes closed until my hunger came,
emitting a slow growl.

I tried to ignore it.

I told it to go away.

Then I pulled the plug and got out of the tub.

I wiped the mirror and stared at pieces of my streaky face,
reflecting pale, freckled skin,
purple bags under my eyes.

I turned away.

I felt unconfident about it all.

I wanted to feed myself sentences written by Hamsun.
Or Spicer.
Or Rimbaud.

I no longer wanted to join the day reaching out to me,
extending its hand,

saying:

“It’s a pleasure meeting you.”
“The pleasure is mine.”

I wanted to go back to bed and do nothing.

I decided to make myself two over easy eggs and toast.

I melted the butter in the pan and cracked my eggs on the counter
and gently put them in the pan without breaking the yolks.

I ate my eggs on the floor,
flipped through the new Now and read a movie review.

The critic loathed it.

He had a real cynical and smug voice, flipping,
poking and goring the picture.

The whole thing was pedantic. Didactic.
Solipsistic. Contrived …

Hokey.

I put my dishes in the sink,
brushed my teeth, spit,
worked up the courage
to stare at myself one last time in the mirror,
grabbed the applesauce,
a blanket from my closet,
shoved them in a tote bag,
put on my toque,
my parka and eight-hole cherry docs.

Then I locked up my apartment
and walked down the hallway to the elevator and waited until finally—
the door opened.

I was alone.
I watched the numbers count down overhead and light up from 12 flashing,
11,
10,
9—stopping at 8.

A slender middle-aged fellow stepped onto the elevator.

His name was Andre.

He worked as a cook at Rivoli,
which is a restaurant on Queen Street.

He always looked so heartbroken with such sad brown eyes
so sad
reaching out
for some sort of lost joy.

I’m pretty sure he drank most days.

I can’t blame him.

I drank most days too.

I could tell he was hungover when he came into the elevator.

I wasn’t.

“—s real cold, mon.”
He smacked his lips together, whistled.

The elevator doors closed.
We went down.

And he went quiet.

3, 2, 1 …

The elevator doors opened.

I hooked a swift left and tucked my head down and thought about how
somewhere the sun is warm everywhere.

There was a band of pigeons with soot-stained city feathers,
huddled in front of the old Martyr Church Bell Tower,
cooing a calming hum, which resonated a sense of peace within me.

I imagine it’s the same way a choir lights up all those people in pews
listening to those angelic voices fill the cathedral.

Or Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

In the distance,
I could see the deep blue low of the single tent.

I felt badly for Mr. Applesauce.

And I couldn’t help but feel sorry for those pigeons too.

I looked back at them,
needling through thoughts and visions,
walking on,
stopping at an old, gnarled oak tree.

I stared up through the branches,
admiring how they look like they are raking the sky for some sun,
which suddenly shone through a slit in a cloud as all this light

fell

for a moment,
then retreated,

again.

I slowly approached.
He coughed.
I almost asked if he was okay.

But I didn’t say anything,
leaving the applesauce and blanket near his tent.

Then I headed to the pub at Queen and John.

The snow was piled high on every corner.

I crunched along the salted sidewalk to the intersection,
waiting as a red, steely streetcar zipped past,
its ding- dinging fading before stopping a block west of me.

An expanse of people, from one end to the other,
pushed themselves on and off
and it was all toques and parkas and boots
squeezing in and out
and the image reminded me of a cuckoo clock
I saw at a junk shop in Parkdale
that had its face smashed in by a hammer,
fragmented,
hands stuck,
still.

A thin woman with sores all over her sad face,
eyes looking like they were thrown to the wind,
walked past me muttering to herself
a mouthful of vocabulary that rang sharply
and then vanished,
begging for change,
stopping, crouching over,
sorting through pieces of salt,
hoping to find something to take her far away from another hard day

—again.

The light was green.

All these shells brushed against me,
no hints of a smile, null eyes,

undisturbed and void.

I scraped my way along like the rest of them.

The pub was dark and empty.

The television behind the bar had CP24 on
and it ran news headlines across the screen in one,
long anxious and endless stream.

Each headline read:

_{It is all going so badly everywhere.}

I noticed the extreme cold warning lit up in red
on the top right-hand corner with temperatures feeling like minus 30 degrees.

A breaking news headline skittered before my eyes:

_{It is still (and will always be) going so badly.}

I ordered a pint.

There was an older man sitting a few stools down from me,
bent head, grim gaze,
staring at the counter,
then at the wall, drifting,
dazed out,
waiting for the beer to lift his spirit,
to help him feel a little better.

I stared at the wall too.
Finished my beer.

And decided to head over to the Horseshoe Tavern.

I walked along and saw all these faces lurking behind windshields,
all these dots of flesh stuck in traffic,
behind wheels,
wondering if there is a real good world out there if they looked for it.

A set of familiar eyes were now staring at me.

It was Tao.

“Where you been hiding?”

Nowhere.

(It’s always nowhere.)

“Let’s go get a drink.”

Passing along the sidewalk,
my eyes peeked in the Stem diner,
catching a glimpse of our reflections in the window,
like two ghosts,
all a part of a past,
which once existed,
had been,

before the future came like a 100-foot wave.

We swung into the bar.

“Shot?” Tao asked.
“No.”
“Let me buy you shot—two shots!”

The older stoic and taciturn bartender came over,
a Horseshoe Tavern legend,
a storyteller of the aged eighties,
a piece woven in the underground culture of Queen Street,
telling tales of live shows from the past…

“Let’s never buckle.”
“What’s that?”

We threw our heads,
pried loose in a moment,
Cuervo in the back of our mouths.

“Where do lovebirds go?” Tao asked a couple sitting at the bar.

And like that, he was gone, now talking to them.

I ordered a pint.
Drank it quickly.

Then continued forward.

I decided to go north on Spadina,
entering the neon hum of Chinatown
with its streetcars shrieking in the snow. Thoughts
pressing inside, blossoming—
one after another
as I tucked into a Chinese restaurant,
ordered two steamed buns,
sipped some hot green tea by the window,
watching people move about the sidewalk,
brushing shoulders in the cold.

I felt lucky to have warm food in my belly.

Across the street I saw a man,
knocked aside by winter,
sitting on the sidewalk,
back pressed against a brick wall.

There was a Tim Hortons cup in front of him—

_{all the doleful,
dimmed and hidden
in an unlivable
present,
harbouring
the lost
golden
marshmallow dream.}

I scribbled those lousy lines in my pocketbook,
always kept in my parka,
as I sat there watching a flow of people move without seeing him.

An orange and white koi fish stared at me
from the tank at the restaurant.

It went to the surface of the water
and took food as if an invisible hand was feeding it bread.

It devoured it, tore it to bits.

I then had a vision of it jumping out of the tank,
flopping around the floor,
gasping for air.

I left.

There was so much afternoon to still whittle away,
all this time to reach into and tear a piece off to think—

now what?

I decided to go to Kensington Market
and wandered into the Last Temptation.

The Vietnamese owner,
Phong,
was at a table in the back
drinking with his friends.

“You goddamned whore.”

I knew that voice.

It was Busker Steve.

“Too damn cold to play Ange today.
Only made $12.25,” he mumbled.

“That’s it. $12.25—
Phong!
Anyone working your bar?”

Phong sauntered over slowly
like he was a character in a John Wayne Western.

“What you want?”
“Your finest glass of house red.”

The hours fell
into this eternal city quicksand
for all of us grazing in the meadow of time
with a thousand half-finished conversations,
all drifting like me tying this nonsense together
as the bar slowly filled with a dull din of rising voices,
cheap chat, wrangling, weaving, wound like a constant tick in the clock.

Busker’s seat was empty now.

It was just me, alone,
crammed between towers of glass and steel
with the sun now swallowed by the lake,
as daylight had rolled off,
punched out,
while the noise had completely punched in bashing through the doors.

A huge crowd was all around,
rude and dull.

The sound of glasses hit tables,
laughter exploded,
voices stuck like pieces of shrapnel
I wanted to pick out of my skin.

All the sounds crawled along the walls
like worms and then up my back,
into my ears, my mind—
blown away by the syllables.

“Yeah. John Irving.”
“Terrible writer.”

AH HAHAHA HAHA!

“Doesn’t he live in Toronno?”

“Ah, hell, man, he’s a great writer,” I interrupted.

“Great writer?”

AH HAHAHA HAHA!‍

“Yeah, sure. Like Dostoevsky, right?”

“Who do you read?” one of them asked me.

“Irving and Grisham,” I answered.‍

AH HAHAHA HAHA!

“Who is this clown?
Looks like Christian Bale in The Machinist.”‍

AH HAHAHA HAHA!

“You need to put some meat on those bones.”

AH HAHAHA HAHA!

8:00
9:00
10:00
11:00
12:00

I finished my last drink,
settled up,
leaving the scene behind.

A warmth had settled in the street,
the cold finally snapping.

Water feverishly fell from icicles hanging off eavestroughs,
streetlights and wires,
dripping onto the pavement,
forming puddles,
little pools reflecting the old Toronto Victorian homes
upside down like all of us,
music now rolling along the curb—
horns and drums,
guitars and chants—
erupting from St. Andrew Street.

I was somewhere between the joy and rush of alcohol,
feeling like I have been here forever,
shovelling aside all the shit piling up inside me,
hoping each word to the next might lead me to answer:

What will they be writing about 2,000 years from now?

Nothing.

(It’s always nothing.)

I was pulled toward the singing and dancing
in the silky snow-melting sloppy street
where a tender hand reached out to me,
pulled me in close to her body,
to those warm, eyes,
eyes I knew before,
somewhere,
so still,
smiling,
passing me a bottle of cabernet sauvignon,
tilting my head back,
sipping, circling around,
staring up at all those freckles in the sky
with such fine music,
the smell of tobacco and lavender oil in the air,
incense, all this wine in my mouth,
feet shuffling on the wet concrete,
jammed full of spirit, spun, laughter,
holding hands, splashing in puddles
as the fat moon poured light all over us
to the drumbeat and horns,
escaping this serious world
with so many serious people taking themselves too seriously—

so often.

When,
out of nowhere,
a low voice rose from the gutter.

“Let’s never buckle…”

Pause.

“Buckle.”

It chanted:

‍“Buckle.”

Then, all at once,
the drums began,
everyone went mad,
stomping their feet.

Then someone screamed:

“To the hatred,
to hatred.”

Let’s never buckle.

I found myself back on Spadina
and under the hum of neon lights.

I was one of the last ones still out,
stepping across cracks filled with the grit
of another day and night,
hanging onto the final hours left,
vanishing before the sun pulls people from their sheets and beds.

I arrived at Grange Park.

A strong warm wind whipped the branches.

I looked up and saw the slab of concrete I lived in
jutting out above the tops of trees
with all those people crammed in compartments,
one above the other,
set in a neat order,
their own little tombs,
caskets of comfort,
a living mausoleum in a world for oneself,
not for those to come,
in this continuous line,
but for oneself, detached
in a grain of time,
like images gradually fading away, falling
from the moon in the puddle
I see now broken in pieces
after I have jumped on it,
sighed,
as screens spilled lights through windows,
flashed, flickered,
scattered all about in the ripples.

I obliterated the moon.
Stepped on the moon.
I stood on the wet moon.

I noticed the tent was gone.
I walked over.
All he left behind was the applesauce.

I picked it up and put it in the garbage.

I wanted to cry.
But I was too tired.

It was the end of a
long
gone
day.

Image by Isaiah Villar.