Grounded

This poem is a conversation with 30-year-old me. I was playing around with the homonymy of the title, and this poem came out of it. The newborn stuck in the sewage grate is a true story from an Alberta piggery my team and I documented a few years ago, and the graphics included are of that pig. I hope Grounded speaks to others who have found themselves disenfranchised in the shadow of the powers they are up against, and if that's you, I hope this poem moves you to remember what it is about you that got you involved in the struggle to begin with.

Fighting for the 2.7 trillion killed 

every year like 

I am an electron 

a piece of a lightning rope 

trying to move up in the world only 

I want to take the world with me. 

-

Remember when 

we were kids when 

the bigness of the world thrilled us 

because one day we would be big too. 

Remember the day Splash 

Mountain malfunctioned they 

took us from our logs and out 

a door into the mountain it 

was just a flight of stairs and 

a green exit sign over 

a door back in to a place that had the nerve 

to still expect us to believe in fairies. 

That plan you had to 

bath the cat with glitter for shampoo you 

woke the next morning and told the boss your plan she 

laughed at you said no said brush your teeth make 

your bed you 

spent the day at Grandma’s while 

the cat 

still matte alone at home stared 

dispiritedly out the living room window. 

These days your philanthropy always sends from a credit card and if 

that feeling: THINGS MIGHT GET BETTER came in a powder 

we know we’d both scrape 

hope into a line and suck it up our noses with hundred dollar bills. 

I think you’re sad because 

you spend your time wondering why 

our critics just don’t get it. 

I’ll tell you why. 

They don’t get that on 

the ground it’s never about the scale. 

You don’t pull a newborn from a sewage grate and say

LOOK AT THEM ALL 

You hold him hopeless you 

watch him disintegrate you 

cry for days you 

wake the next morning and tell the boss your plan to 

kill the man who did this and 

your critics laugh and the boss 

tells you you’re grounded for 

even thinking such a thing. 

Sometimes I 

think we should raid the place and take 

one and a half million animals out to drop 

off at the residences one 

animal per door but 

they still wouldn’t get it would they 

? 

They would bathe the animals in glitter for 

all the wrong reasons and criticize the Chinese 

for having less discrimination. 

- 

I look at you your 

longing keeps me going I 

would give everything to go 

back to the top of the mountain and 

anticipate the drop forever to 

live in a place where 

suffocating a fish is no way 

to bond with a father where 

a corpse on a dining room table is no way 

to give thanks where 

we never believed in fairies to begin with where 

we know the drop is coming where 

we feel the splash in our bones before it happens where 

the click-click of the log climbing replaces the snap of what 

as kids we called the wish bone only 

this time 

the ride doesn’t break. 

Your longing it 

moves me forward because 

when I see it in your eyes 

that longing o god 

it takes me back.