by Jennifer Bland

Created on: August 20, 2009

Montreal is for Alzheimer's:

A scale, a scab, a cell-

something to flake

To scrape off and leave behind, forsake and try to forget

A need, a plane, a newness-substance and strangeness

An absent mind, a heavy loss, materials and conflict; interruption

Tracing back the paths that we never tread

Seeking the long gone and unrelated-things never possessed or processed

A single shoe, mate-less, curbside, garbage

To wonder, how do the things we know get so detached and misplaced

Why everything remains so detached, foreign-old and fresh

Cyclic: demolish, rehabilitate...fragments and rubber cement

A woman, a spirit, sings alone and this matters so we walk

Entombed, laughing, derailed-hapless and curious with doubt

All the strangers in prisms, dissected hues moving in egos and steel birds

In clouds, moving vans, stuffed with things that burn and places to see

To slide beads along the track, to tally up the hits

Tattooing the times on every inch of our failing skin, on pulsing canvas, on time

It becomes a poem, a song broadcasted to our heart's ears of the mind

A stronger muscle, a one that keeps, stores, and reconfigures

One to gnash our own selveswith rusty teeth

Causing scars that swell and shrink

With the clock's ticking fingers and the calendar's infinite chronology-

Ever proceeding, never receding, the avalanche of seconds, minutes to months

The want is greater than the breaking down

The need is smaller than the words expelled

The stomach is weaker than the truth

And the eyes are bigger than the windows of looking back

If we could be smaller, if our intentions controlled the zoom

If everything else could seem so much bigger-

Bigger than the dust beneath our ignorant steps

Bigger than the tile, the ice beneath our weight

There might be passive mouths to use and open chests to inhabit

And empty nooks to rest inside

But we are tired, sleepy with the paths we didn't take

Exhausted by the heavy words our receivers couldn't translate-

Words that couldn't find their way home

And reshape the maps we followed in the fog

In the darkness-

Such unknowing,our blinded fingers scraping walls

If only we could share the burden

Distribute evenly the pounds-

The pressures of toting the brightest torch we'll ever know-

Illuminating worlds that we could have

the life that we should share

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