and feigning a list of illnesses I can recollect that are
severe enough to get me away from this
pubescent haven, without the car light promises
of heaven, bleeding through to the anxious youth
who forget his hat, rag atop his head,
and looking for a fight,
yet blas� enough to avoid North Ajax Medical.
And later, drowning in the descendant twilight,
jumping the gun again,
I can see you all, sitting 'round the campfires moth white light
singing Wonderwall, that damned generic tune,
humming the words you don't know,
and pissing yourself in fear
lest your secret be discovered,
that you might not know the song.
That an oasis is merely
an exhausted fools mirage in the desert.
Sympathy remains in short supply,
for the smart kid who happens to be shy.
And I find it no easier now
then when I saw in that oil-lamp stain
the foundation;
to put a face to the fear I saw reflected in his glasses,
to reduce the go-quick, give-up nature in pain
that chokes you in your sleep,
and slips away like a brown shadow in the dawn -
that dawned the next day when you woke up,
infertile and alone, and ran until you dissolved into the bare birch tree's deep
in the Ontario of old -
After making away with your shirt,
it might not cradle you in the comfort
that so warms you at this moment child,
when a phone call home to mother,
is a sweater in itself;
Car-wash green, and sequin stained,
cat-pawed and moth eaten, a loose fitting affair
that would find itself at home,
amongst the tarpaulins at Goodwill. All maimed,
all best-intentioned, but holding her back -
I saw it all in a blur�