Montreal will always be about poverty and freedom stuck in a cage. dreams that manage to float above the corrugated steel. beer in a bag and bums squatlegged on a cardboard with the quintessential dog and the bilingual sign can't work give me argent stp
can't won't can't won't
this town was never about working and vivre la difference was projected in the offshoots and roll offs of acumen and the lesser gods. welfare mothers pepsi cola chips and chocolate icecream sweating garbage men picking up maggot born bags spewn open on the curb in the sweltering the purply sky of summer humid live caldron of heat wave in your face no place for sweat to go it sticks on your skin like an infringement to space can't go out to dissipate can't go in to have never been stuck in tight jeans and on backsides rolling down the slippery shallows of body voluption great tits by the way. tacky ouash! bingo signs on the doors of churches with their steeple way above the third floor building restriction once upon a time you just had to look up and remember that god was watching you in every neighbourhood on every street corner. it's in the dreams and in the collective unconscious. it's in the water. green grasses parks salted through the neighbourhoods bicycles everywhere. i lived on all these streets these streets where the sex and love and drugs and the lungs and the voice your voice and others flying through the broken glass the tainted glass the brushed and smoked glass the isadora of pandora the isis of poetry how it oozed from the crumbling and the dank and the dim like those long apartments facing the east side-never any sun, everybody knew that. flatroof town. i loved you and i smoked you to death.
Montage from photos by Michel Saint Jean
wow does that suck
ReplyDeleteWellies, wellies, wellies Francine. Fancy meeting you here. Your writing is as pungent as ever. Stream of consciousness. I recognize the Montreal you describe, in parts, but it isn't the Montreal I've known myself, from your point of view. And I've lived literally everywhere from north, south, east, west and every point in between since age 4. A "few" more decades than you. (grin)
ReplyDeleteWhat you have written fascinates me and if you don't terribly mind, I'd like to "borrow" it and post to my blog. I can do something with it that will be an interesting contrast to what you done with it.
I miss you Francine. Will you be in Montreal
any time in the forseeable fture? I'd like to know if you get back East perhaps in the Summer?
I owe you a lunch. :))
Warmies,
Gwen