Dominik Parisien
OLD YOUNG MAN
Youth is not a shield
but a spell:
the illusion that
for a time
one should be
immortal,
untouched.
You are too young
to be so ill.
Why tell me I am wrong
impossible
as I am
when I am
here.
* * *
DEGENERATION
When we speak in the abstract
of generations dissipating
Soon, that way of thought will die
with them
we so often hope
for the extinction only of an other.
Like grammar, exceptions are everywhere:
please, not our parent or pépère. Just the fading of the older.
*
When they speak in the abstract
of generations degenerating
Back in my day children weren’t,
well, whatever this is
they so seldom see anything
but themselves. In the absence
of their mother or mémère, the words
of old become their own.
*
When we speak in the abstract
of generational dealings
I would or we won’t,
we were or we didn’t
we all forget past and future
are not just times or tenses
but languages we think we speak
fluently.
Dominik Parisien’s work can be found in The Fiddlehead, Plenitude, Train: a poetry journal, Uncanny Magazine, as well as other magazines and anthologies.
His poetry chapbook, We, Old Young Ones is forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press. He is also the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Starlit Wood,
which won the Shirley Jackson Award, and Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual, French Canadian. He lives
in Toronto.
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