Day 2

So I will keep to my word and post more here today. I have been working on the poem that I hope will be selected by CBC to become a song and I am not really bothered by who records it either. Maybe I should ask for my old friend Rob Barrie who makes a living as a musician in Cape Breton to be the one. I still have the 7" 45 rpm record of him that he gave me in college nearly 25 years ago. 'Coke Avenue' is one of the songs, and as I recall it wasn't half bad. When we had our 20th anniversary reunion for my college, Rob was there in the pub with his guitar singing and playing all night (along with others).

I live in Toronto now and it's a whole different world here in the downtown city from the small town where I grew up, or even Belleville, where I moved to attend college in the early '80s.
There aren't as many natural wonders and beautiful scenes here for sure. I've seen the mountains of BC and Alberta, the thousands of beautiful lakes and rivers that fill Ontario, and so much more across this great land. I am sure there will be more than a few songs which will be selected that will sing the praises of our natural beauty and grandeur.

I would like to see at least one or two about the urban landscape of Canada. I am pleased that someone in Vancouver for example, has built a campaign for the downtown east side. I have been through that area and I have never seen anything like it anywhere else in Canada. I hope it will be given strong consideration for the interesting and real place that it is. It is fantastic that someone in a city that is surrounded by so much natural beauty chose to offer another choice for a song topic.

Urban settings can be even more complex and beautiful than nature because the subject usually contains humans in all their multitude of varieties. People come in in different sizes and shapes and they also have rich, dense layers of personality, intelligence, quirks and flaws. The city brings together a large number of people into a relatively small geographic space and the opportunities to observe human nature are virtually unlimited. Because Toronto is such a multi-cultural city the human landscape is of a global scope.

9 months ago I moved to Isabella Street in downtown Toronto. I am now living in the front of a charming apartment building that is on the edge of St. Jametown, the most densely populated square mile in Canada. It is a microcosm in this one small area with people from around the world, but also mixed in are people with different socio-economic traits from areas like Cabbagetown, Rosedale and the gaybourhood which surround St. Jamestown. A trip to my local discount food store is always interesting and colourful.

Maybe you have to live here to appreciate it but the noises and people are always around you, day or night. It is early in the morning when the noise is nearly gone that I often here a sound which inspired this poem.

more to follow...cjonisabella