My mother is also

My mother is also something of a nutbar...

an experiment to those in the mental health industry
to be tagged and studied and drugged into sense,

she is also an aging wild thing from rural Ontario,
a force of life-hungry wonder walking and busing
and making her way through Northern Muskoka
arthritic knees barely slowing her down
come granite or pine rise.

She laughs and cries and calls damnation down on the dour
and the lifeless living the dull devoid,
a whirlwind hospital visitor and friend
of the broken and the downward-spiraling
outcasts of all systems.

She will abide any suffering but
having to listen to bullshit from those
who know best, because she always knows better:
she wants to live until she's 150
because living never ceases to amaze her
and because those who think they know best
live half-lives of decay
that just get in her way.

With her purse and her bag in hand,
she hobbles about, squeezing life out of pennies
as she has for decades, dissecting
the politics of poverty around her
with the same communist analysis she
learned off my father in the 1950's,
bastards, she says, and bastards they are.

She laughs like a crazy lady, infectious
and effusive, like laughter was meant
for tearing light out of darkness;
meant to be flung into misery
like a rope to those floundering
in the long sadness of loss.

They have broken my mother,
but she will not stop living,
she will go gently into many things,
but she was born on the banks
of the Mad River, and loves
its wildness;
though grief consume the land
she will wade into the water,
she will rejoice
and damn the bastards
and she will guard the broken
until she falls.