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
What do I think of when I am driving home from work over early morning vistas of golden ochre, naples yellow, french vanilla, burnt caramel- humps of dry tuft, sticks of artemesia, burnt umber; samphire becoming at one with the universe.
I think of her, you, my mother I think of how it aches to miss you to miss you so badly and about how you drove me to ignition on so many occasions how it's all a convolusion the incongruous melange of both reticence and boldness that made so much of you that which is intricately incorporated to the inside mechanism of what makes me do the things that I do. I was a kid so as kids we make mistakes, so many mistakes, so fucked up I wish so much that you could have taken better care of me, made me feel like a girl was just a regular strong and powerful thing but you couldn't, your limitations too strong to fight, and fight I remember in my early teens when you went back to school and on the side lines learnt about Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and all of that bra burning jazz. How you had no one to rebound with- just silence from your man, where's my dinner and beer woman, words shrouded in more sophisticated middle class talk. It was a liberation for you and you, after such years of female drudgery were so eager to imbibe- finally some real food and clean water. Our nuclear world was still consuming miracle whip though so your struggle was lost to to the ears of what people were chattering about: the weaker sex, the darker mind, the mysterious female- don't try and understand'em-don't trust'em with the pocket book, eh-hehe and on the continuum of cheap formula it goes, not withstanding; ladies first- yea right- how you always made sure everyone else came before you.
scene #3100- hospital take- my father in emergency recovering after morphine overdose that a doctor poorly requested, I am placing your foot in the stirrups of the wheel chair from your car in the parking lot to take you to see him and you wince with pain- I scoot up your skirt to find gigantic ulcerated holes in your calf that you haven't told anyone about- no no it's ok I'll go to the clinic tomorrow it's alright.
It's alright-sure- way back in those conservative suburban years of the late 70's you delicately and clandestinely and in increments, put your excitement of rebirth emancipation back on the shelf and really only took it down again during torrid fights with your husband. Philosophy never shines in battle.
You see, I have to grow up and forgive you-forgive you for teaching me the ways of the second class sex. I have to stop blaming you for my failings and my incongruous melange of both reticence and boldness that makes so much of me- that which directly stems from an intricate osmoses of the inside mechanism of what made you do the things that you did. I wish that I had been braver for you and braver for myself and braver for my daughters. For my daughters and I, I have the time. All the time in the world. I love you and miss you so much.
