Poems from A Small Matter Of Inclusion

 DECLARATION FOR THE BANISHED

May they come,
come in numbers.
May they be safe
no matter the plight,
no matter the chosen route.

Our economy needs them.
Our hospitals need them.
Our schools need them.
Our cities need them.
Our towns need them.
Our children need them.
Our fears need them.

I have no problem
with anyone
from any other country
coming to Canada
to exhibit the cost of
wanting to remain
a human being,
a human
being allowed a
new chance to be alive.

There, I said it.

*

THE EXPANSE OF INCLUSION

All the blinds must be opened in the morning
in the home I never needed
to board an unexpected voyage to find,
to end up owning in a country
known around the world as Canada
where I would have to begin again,
finding enough jobs to finally
bring my family back together
after not being able to see my wife
and young son for the seven years it took
to watch them walk into the airport
near the town we can all call our place
where we will find lives both new & sane.
No, I never had to survive that.

To know how alive I am in the moment
comes due to his story of how he had to,
to begin a relationship with all things new,
things being how-tos, why-nots, what-ifs
or at times should I stay or should I stay?
And how alive I am in the moment also
can be gauged by never forgetting the sight
of his happiness and trying to imagine it,
only to accept I cannot, perhaps, just for now.
Yes, together, we chased a weekly pay-cheque.

Mel is short for Melanio.
Mel is short for Melanio.

A man from the Philippines,
who left his country before the foreign litter
was supposed to be a promise of
usable plastics, shipped by a saboteur
he even would have known as Harper,
shipped for the purpose of recycling what
is now being returned, an expense no new
man, no new taxpayer should have to pay.
Maybe, I too, want my homeland a difference.

There is no limit to any chance for change,
our so-called leaders no matter their errors,
no matter their unbearable duration in office,
seem to have an endless source of others
lined up eager to be replicas of them.

Some, then, ask why bother leaving homelands?
Some choose not to see and accept the reasons.
All I wish to say is welcome over and over!

*

LEARNING TO BE AN OLDER MAN

Sometimes the challenges our current world
forces on the days I feel settled
have little to do with the load
my new bones carry, meaning those
I now contain since reaching 60—well,
that was the waxy number friends & family
had stuck in the tastiest of cakes.

I still wonder if a singer wants the
audience to appear ready to hurt itself,
to be taking what he says & sings
as a point of ignition, any reason to
begin the circles to form a mosh-pit.

I still wonder where all my past
fellow workers, fellow partiers are,
now that this learning is under way--
are they in the same class, rooms or
lives all across Canada, no matter what
the years try to whisper each & every day?

As the yellowest leaves seem to twinkle
I long for a walk, with the season
we know comes before the snow, a freshness
the sniffling nose uses to revive me,
to remind me of the vein's health
during the steps toward brief breezes
also sent to be teachers as we
somehow survive another time of voting
when so many seem to be changing
due to how the world is sending them,
and, believe me, they come because of it
somehow still spinning, quiet orbits
regardless of the time clocks own.

Simply, how I may not be alone
with this new learning, this love of others,
those I eagerly await,others brought here
to our Canada I step back for, stand up with,
trying to wisely & wily accept this Age.