Heavy fog this morning, chaining the night, and the garbage
trucks are out collecting, and I’m inside without a light on.
Dear friend, what’s it like to be given an expiration date?
That’s what I’m wondering about — while outside in the dark,
the hydraulic clang and roar of diesel digests a street of waste.
I’m trying to find a way into that moment, in that office, that sterile room,
and those razor words, the colour of cobalt, coming at you,
dropping from the lips of a bleached lab coat.
Words that grow, metastasize in your mind and in the mind of your dear one:
“I can’t breathe,” is what she said, and then hundreds of miles away,
here in the dark, I couldn’t breathe — brain shatters, fingers freeze to the keys.
Please, I pray to anything and everywhere, more time, more aliveness,
more justice, for one whose humour we can’t afford to go without;
and when I say, we, I mean this whole freaking country, weeping planet,
we can’t afford it, it’s morose enough.
Please, less pain, less grief, less absence, less dying,
and I’m thinking of his kids, and theirs, those grand-little-ones;
and his partner, who’d parted but partnered once more — a radiant
second chance at joy — whose losses are ample enough,
her sorrow, sorrow enough.
Friend, please — you know we’re selfish — how will we will on?
how will we float without your depth? how will we liftoff without
your propellant? your ebullient flourish that neons the room.
How, without your quotable cynicism, your obscure playlist
of Christian disco, your library of satire, your range of parody —
your studied spoofs of preachifying fundies and blathering politicos?
Your, still, sly hope.
And me? How will I plot my week without your truth-serum talk?
How will I spew my beer, without hearing nuthatch, spotted towhee,
worked into some blithe conversation? A perfect send-up
of my interest in birds, and your inbuilt interest in wit.
The city is your natural habitat, mine, a cabin in the bush,
you’re big apple, I’m small saskatoon — “Odd,” I said,
“But not a bad dish,” you said.
Friend, we need your sauce, your irreverence, your pretense skewers.
We need your irreligion that reveals a truer faith. Your self-deprecating
manner that masks a trove of human understanding. Your testament
of unassuming generosity, your witness of unassailable love for family.
At times, if you’re lucky, somewhere along the road, a friend appears
and fills in your lack. Gives voice to a voice you didn’t know you had.
Stays; restores a faith in that old word, fellowship — community’s superglue —
and the inescapable upshot of something going on, beyond.
