yesterday a bird sat down on the power line
just outside my house-
he clamped his beak on the
wire and twisted and pulled until it
snapped in half.
he touched the broken line to
the one underneath it
until sparks flew and he
smoked,
               fell
                     to
                         the
                               ground
                                             .

his body was too mangled
to identify what kind of
bird he was
but experts say he was most likely
one of the two
endangered monsters that
swam in the pond behind the oaks.

i wonder if the remaining will
**** himself next.

Hold my hand.
I'm not asking you,
hold my hand.
step back from the ledge you climbed up to,
take a breath,
hold my hand,
move back grab my fingers,
hold tight to my wrists,
grab at my elbows move past them
hug my waist
and i will keep you from falling the very least Ill you help you back up,
and like you,I  too  feel like falling,
late at night,
between the cold sheets and the corner room,
I scratch at the raw parts,
scars that I beg to heal,
I poke at the raw meat and the bruises,
I make believe and etch and sketch all in the same sequence,
but I offer this body,
worn and weathered,
I'll do my very best to shield you from the cold,
step back from the edge love,
I need you to see what you mean to me.

I saw you in Tim Hortons for the first time in three years.
You told me I had grown and
I congratulated on you on your weight loss.


She is my best friend.
You didn't raise a child,
You raised an ironwork frame.
You threw a girl into reality before she could even spell the word.

And I would love to look at the other side, but I can't—
it always loops back around like that little girl
doing circles around on her ten-speed as she pulls up
to the convenience store to buy you cigarettes.

Hey, at least you called her an ambulance—
On Thanksgiving Day when she passed out
from lack of nutrition because you spent your last welfare check
on something I don't even want to hear your excuse for.

I remember my mother, coming into my room at eleven pm on a Wednesday, telling me to put some shoes on because you snapped a pool cue and placed it to a guy's neck.

My pajama pants ripped as I broke into your apartment to wake my best friend up and tell her that my mom was parked outside and she had to spend the night at my house.

You spent the night in the drunk tank hitting on officers.
She spent the night beside me crying and asking for any other mother but you.

We were in grade 6.

When she was 13, she had to live with me for 3 months because social services deemed you, "unstable."
When she was 14, she moved away to the city because she couldn't handle you anymore.

I went to visit her last weekend and she didn't say a single word about you.

A friend the other
day
told me a story
  of a cousin-neighbor-friend
some kid
who saw a kid get bullied on the
      TV
and he told his
grandmother the story
  as if the memory was his own
           and she
                      freaked
out and called the school
   raving/yelling until
she found out that the story
wasn't her grandson's at all
          just a fabrication
in a blank space
his mind thought a
   memory
            should be and
a friend the other
day
told me that last week she cut
lines into her
   self
because she needed to feel anything
         and I didn't
                       freak
out because I understand
that we need to feel
pain
and we need to remember
pain                          
   and you can try to ****
   the feeling out the feeling
       that too much is easy and
you   are    weak
    because of it
or
you can
             fabricate
pain
   in a way that let's you
tell yourself you deserve all of the
love you crave so severely