The well was sealed

The windows boarded

The doors were locked

And the lights turned out

All to contain it

All to keep this family of demons

Out of sight

Stay away from this house

Give the town a wide berth

You don’t want to uncap this bottle

Gotta keep the genie inside

This house of screams

This house of dreams

Where some possibilities

Should remain hidden

I asked my mum

Why’d you pick Saint Jude

As my baptismal name?

He’s the patron saint

Of hopeless cases, she said.

What the hell?

I don’t think you are hopeless

And she laughed the way she laughed

I just think people in our family,

We need this kind of saint…

Or put another way by my heart

As she listened to the story –

I think your mum wanted you to know

There’s always good no matter what.

At confirmation I picked Saint Francis

But not any old Francis, Mr. Assisi himself

Because anyone who loves animals

Is king in my books…

That’s when I became

Peter James Jude Francis Cantelon

Believer in hope, lover of animals.

grandpa shot nazis out of the sky
from the ass-end of his Lancaster
while they skipped bombs across a lake
and waited for the dam to break
living out his squadron motto:

apres moi le deluge

i understand this sentiment
and i embody those feelings
concrete holding back the world
waiting for the concussion
that cracks the wall in two:

apre moi le deluge

words pour out
like water from a busted hydrant
drowning everything and everyone
while washing all the filth away
and the children come out
and play in accidental rain,
spontaneous fun is their specialty
after all.

the cherries are cold in my mouth
picked fresh from the tree out back
by me, by her, by us…
they burst with sour and sweet
testing every space upon my tongue
and the seeds are spit with abandon
to the bowl that sits upon my lap
one, two, three, four, five, six
they suit my addictive personality
and the red flesh fills my eyes

It is a weird thing to hurt the ones we love. It seems the very opposite of what love is supposed to be. Unfortunately my experience growing up was as a living witness to this again and again and again, until it seeped like a poison into my skin.

My mother, a single woman living on welfare with four kids, and no friends to speak of sometimes showcased this. In moments of deep depression at her state and her life’s experience, with no outlet, mum would sometimes turn to the only ones close to her and express rage.

For us this never meant being struck. I was never hit as a child, not once. It did mean exposure to incredible pain we were not mature enough to deal with. It leaves scars. Sometimes those scars hurt others.

I know as I have grown into an adult I have sometimes lashed out even at the ones who are closest to me in the mistaken belief that they have nowhere to go and are the safest people I can pour my rage and sad into. After all they have carried so much of my load, why not more?

Unfortunately one of the problems with the instinct to turn our sadness on our loved ones is that after awhile, in order to keep doing it without feeling horrible about ourselves, we come to a crossroads where we have to choose to dehumanize and push our loved ones away.

Over time the guilt of directing so much darkness at our loved ones becomes so great we begin to resent them and even become angry with them so that we can continue to drown them in our own darkness. Once we push them far enough away they begin to feel like they were the reason we were sad in the first place and, if we can simply get rid of them or replace them, we will find our happiness.

I watched my mum do this again and again with the people who came into her life (both the few good ones and the many bad ones). Mum never came to see how she would regularly redefine her loved ones with her pain until they seemed to be the source instead of the evil people who had abused her and the resultant deep inner experiences and scars she carried.

When she finally realized what she had done with her pain she often felt it was too late and she was trapped in her new circumstance. She felt that she had pushed too hard, hated too much, and thus was not forgiveable. That people needed to be away from her. This is the saddest part of her cycle – a failure to understand love having never experienced it as a child growing up. She never really believed she deserved love and forgiveness and so instead she just kept searching for human painkillers through crowds of the unworthy each of whom would disappoint her in the end but never as much as she disappointed herself.

To my shame I have been guilty of doing this to my own loved ones – children, friends, and even my wife. My darkness has sources different than my mum’s but they overlap. For years as a child I experienced regular, sometimes daily, sexual abuse at the hands of men who I was supposed trust. Men who were supposed to be good. This has a way of twisting a person to their foundations. I have spent the years since working hard to untwist myself, and where I cannot, I seek to incorporate the brokeness into something new and beautiful like the Japanese art of kintsugi.

Pain manifests in odd ways. For me it becomes a fertile field for anxiety, paranoia, self-doubt, self-destructive behaviour and worst of all…black seeds of hate that I work very hard at exterminating when they rise up.

Unlike my mum I have come to believe I am worthy to be loved, worthy of forgiveness, and capable of forgiving.

Ironically I am these things because of my mum. She was so terrifed we would embody what she perceived as her own lack of value that she relentlessly and with great force poured all of her available love, broken and torn as it was, into us. She made us believe we could find and hold love…she took every value and belief she should have held for herself and gave it to us never realizing there was enough for her too.

I miss my mum in ways these days I cannot understand nor adequately express. Even as I type this I weep at her absence. No one understood sadness the way she did. I could tell her anything without fear of judgement and she would often ground me with her own words of experience.

She would say:

“Peter, you need to step back and trust you are loved by the people in your life. You cannot constantly live in a state of doubt and fear or it will push people away. Peter, you need to be the outstanding man I know you are. Love yourself ferociously and others will too.”

There is no sleeping

Alone in the dark

There is no rest

In broad daylight

There are only demon’s

And the ghosts

Of demons past

Come to wail in my ears

And scream of irony

And past sins come back

To tear this life to shreds

Fire was asleep in peace

Hiding in the world

Dreaming of peaceful times

And the absence of rage

Now buried in the past

Until startled to wakefulness;

So fire went wandering

A demon into the world

Seeking the cold one

Who set his flesh aflame

And when he found him

Resting in secret stolen places,

Fire spoke of ominous days:

“Behold I rise up now

Unquenchable flame

Sparked by your folly

And I will burn your life

To the salted earth

Beneath your clay feet

And the lives of everyone

You ever loved with you

Leaving ash and tears;

I will be the monster you made

Consuming everything

To the last black bone.”

This is the way of fire

Broken it races through the world

Leaving pain in its wake.

our cats
are an old married couple
bitching at each other
when they get to close
but secretly searching
when one gets too far

two old ladies in love
couldn’t agree on anything
except the need
to always see
where the other might be
“always stay near to me”
their deep, internal, and silent plea.

i’ve taken to lying
on the right side of the bed
where i can breathe better
and sense the presence,
hold tight to the fragrance
of a ward of sorts
who drives out the dark
with the light that spills
from the breaks
that prove life is lived