ABC gum

High summer, and I’m searching for you in my heart. In the evenings, people go out into the treed streets with their children. Dogs are happy. Strawberry ice cream drips down your hand and into my heart.

In the park, jugglers, swingers, fools, the very young.

I go to the grocery store, which is cool inside with products from the colonies: bananas, avocados. Blueberries gathered by migrant workers in Surrey.

I listen with ear buds to pornography while I shop. Up the aisles and down the aisles, deep into places described in dirty talk. A child, disobeying a frustrated parent, clamours into a cart with another smaller child.

In the morning drinking coffee, it occurs to me that death occurs only to the living. The living are receptacles for the dead, who are unable to go anywhere except back into living hearts.

If backward transmission of a person into the living is the only way the dead continue to exist, then backward transmission of other substances must also be possible.

Labour? Ice cream? Blueberries? Pornography? Shame? Love? I begin to suspect that almost everything I have ever called mine arrived from somewhere else.

Come into me. Come into my strawberry-dripping heart.