Living the Dream

Sometimes Louis walks like fluid-filled,
Seeping around the corners of downtown Desmarais,
KFC, Riverside Bar, Riverside Gas, Northern store,
Home Hardware, Burger Baron-Pizza Place,
Northern Store, Northern other store,
and the Band Liquor Store. That is where
his shadow seeps around the corners.
Sometimes Louis goes to church,
but only for funerals or free meals or rides.

Funerals almost sobered Louis and he walked woodenly
past his usual haunts to the big blue community hall
on the last night of the wake, he called “Awake!”
Here, he took in shapes of flowers and the heavy
smell of carnations, never the cards or the letters
golden in the care for the moment. He scuffed
to the front and peered into the next box
that held the next new release from the cells of life.
A man, a mother, a child never failed to bring Louis out
and he could look really sad because sadness was kin to him.

“Doesn’t he look good, cleaned up?” the crowd would titter.
They waited for Louis to topple over in grief, pull his hair,
cut off his finger, spill the flask of courage from his coat pocket.

After the viewing, Louis let the crowd shoulder him
to the white building at the edge of South Wabasca Lake
where hymns and chants skittered across the water
landing on things that needed them.

Louis must have always been a dying old man.
The man in the bottle was his father, his grandfather, his child.
He swigged the swill of a million tears held back
just to feel. “Don’t he look good?” No, he looks dead.
He can not get out of there fast enough
to drown that feeling of almost crying
for anything that has died. Riverside Louis
never misses a funeral for the chance to grieve.

Tags: Poems //