I’m searching for you
street after street,
household after household.
Your entire block has vanished,
uncountable mystery.
.
.
(I’ve just spent 2 days combing 2000 entries in the 1921 Montreal census in search of the block where my father lived. I can’t find it in any of the districts, though I have found addresses within 5 mins walk in all directions. It’s like they forgot to enumerate his neighbourhood. So frustrating!).
Once pain and loneliness was devoured
in hamburgers, milkshakes, and pasta.
But she wanted love, and she imagined
love came to the lithe more easily.
So she huffed and puffed and starved and carved
batted her eyes and bagged a boy.
But life means sacrifice and imperfection
and lack of twenty four hour adoration were devoured
in grilled cheese sandwiches, chocolate and pies,
until her perfect image was compromised by
becoming oversized. Never her fault of course,
bilious and blaming others for her bitterness
She huffed and puffed and starved and carved
and when the right size was realized, and devised an escape,
climbed into bed after bed until one was willing to buy
more permanent access: a perfect lie.
Objective achieved once more bilious gases expand
The desperate, devouring girl pretends to have fun,
a reality show with an audience that’s blind and dumb.
Whatever the social media illusion that feeds our delusion,
eventually we must face the conclusion of our own prostitution.
What do we sell ourselves for?
Lightning has sliced the sky
forced apart air until the earth
is shaking with fear of it.
The universe conspires to send us messages.
Warm greetings from those who’ve gone ahead
Into the vast unknown, and we receive their love
and keep them alive in memory.
You are eager to make friends,
straining toward possibility
Mom! Mom! Let me go!
Hey! Hey! Friend!
But you must learn self-control
and prove reliable before
you’ll be unleashed on the world.
.
.
First puppy obedience class today. Someone was the most excited one in the room: way too excited to pretend to be one of the cool kids, and he talked WAY too much. Apparently he is truly my dog. (cough).
He says she’s not a pebble.
He says she’s more like an interesting rock formation.
Ah, but rock formations were once mountains
as mountains become pebbles
in time.
.
This mountain fills all we can see
I step this way.
You step that way.
Distance grows until we have disappeared from view.
From where we are now, we can each squish
a mountain between our finger and thumb.
I am but one pebble on the beach of your memory,
but oh how I remember the tides of you,
lapping across the surface of me,
making me shine for a moment,
glinting in the sunlight refracted by your ripples,
toppling me in your surf, ’til I clattered like applause
as you went back out to sea.
I feel like I could follow him
around the house saying ‘No’
because getting into trouble
always seems his goal.
But mischief is usually
just a disguise for boredom,
so I’ll work on tricks instead
so I can reward him.
Making time is part of the contract
and I’m the one who chooses how to act.
.
.
Look at those mischievous eyes! There’s a lot of training to give him a job to keep him out of trouble! So far (at 5 months old) he knows: sit, lie down, lie across my feet, stand on 2 feet, go to your bed, move back, fetch, drop the toy, trade whatever is in his mouth, put the ball on the lacrosse stick…
(Those awesome purple patent leather and psychedelic pink shoes are Fluevog Pearl Harts which were the shoes that celebrate finishing my Masters and my birthday last week. Very festive, no?) 🙂
Shawn L. Bird 