i was born in montreal a winters slip that bloomed in fall due my fathers lot in life i got his name and i killed his wife as if her blood id broken through had never been enough for two so i was sent out early on to cutting black ice on the pond to lying flat and pulling free whatever might rise up to me i held my tongue for seven years fluttered my hands closed my ears as if deaf to every word refusing every song i heard that might connect me to this ground and hold me should i speak its sound so silence spoke for me instead and hovered like the passing dead whose prayer is but a laugh unfurled above this lost edge of the world when i was twelve my father fled he left me all he was and had his hammer and a dying fire an empty vein and one desire to lead my pony from the mines and ride him hard beyond the time of broken long forgotten souls who become their fathers in these holes that spark and fume and smoke and seethe and claim these hills but cant claim me i was wild at twenty three my burning mind turned to the sea and a sour engine room of a war ship hoping war came soon i spent my rage in tiny towns wherever we might run aground and every face that met my eye was calling on some wish to die but if i stood and drank alone then that wish became my own the years ran as if for their lives i the shameless beau of a governors wife standing just outside of view holding hats and coats and shoes then running guns for a lost decade posing as a doctors aide i pushed pins in maps to show how to stop a plague or make it go and then they took me out in chains when a secret shared had changed the game but all those days have fled somehow and nothing occupies me now except for this strange thought of you who sat before me back in school and trailed a rope of braided hair across the back rail of your chair and learned to sign your name in air and read from lips oh i mightve dared to simply move my own so you could read please love me and might have too