peer or imposter

I was still awake, and I knew your painting hides in my attic
(the one Kareco did) above the room you once occupied
and I thought the oil-drawn eyes were lighting the square chamber
of that pyramid, with strong yellow light from what source
I cannot say. And I turned on my pillow, hoping to catch
the occasional machine-gun bursts of typewriter keys in your
private world (the one we never really see)
but the strain in the dark was such I could only hear
mythological burglars and imaginary young men with hammers,
testing doorframes. My heart was a huge Bear on a hillside
paused among the trees, trying hard to remember,
watching the world of its peers & imposters,
almost as if you were really here. And in this house that is not
a pharoah's tomb, and that is not President Lincoln's tomb,
I caught my wonderment, in the midst of a usual insomnia, trying
to feel what you must feel when you awake in your bedroom
in your family's home in Dayton, Ohio.

Gary Davidson lived on Scarritt Street in the period before he went to Virginia to study at Hollins College. Sometime during that period our old friend, Karen Cooper, did an oil painting of Gary that was a leetle bit on the scary side, and Gary left it in the attic on Scarritt. Scarritt's attic was a four sided pyramid in shape, and Tim indulged his 1970s mysticism with several pyramid experiments, one of which that achieved a kind of success (not what I thought, of course). Also during that time a young man across the street, crazed after a five day drug odyssey, went nuts with a hammer and murdered two old men in his building and attacked several other people before being disabled by an elderly african-american gentleman in a drug store who was defending his eight year old grand-daughter. Both Gary and I were true paranoids in the 1970s, and why not? There obviously was cause. My paranoia had more to do with the FBI visiting in 1969 when the people I was hanging with had this sort of weird association with some of the people in the Chicago Seven (Abbie and Jerry, actually). In any case I had no drivers license through most of the 70s, and little of an official identity. This poem comes from a dream. When Gary lived at Scarritt, he would arise very early (5-6 a.m.) and start writing in the dining room before anyone else was up. And Gary was famous in Scarritt circles for his first novel, Stuffed, which was about an animate talking stuffed bear. Clearly, I would have liked to be counted as a peer, and not an imposter.