"Things I'd Still Do" by Dré Pontbriand

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20
with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen
shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South;
a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy
stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out
with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the
border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip
a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time
-traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober,
makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by
a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out
the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened
gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not
because they’re mine but because they never will be.
Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months
without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms
of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn
that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences,
a purple velvet rope is all you need. The prophet
heads North and Tara asks Are you sure he’s not the one
who stole all your shit? Nope. Hand what’s left of me
to a golden-haired dreamer who hymns any instrument
he holds. Change my mind about building a home in the
gap between his front teeth. Leave him carving our initials
in the rearview like the one before him left me. Fall in love
during a solar eclipse. Let a wizard undress my notions
of pleasure in the stolen darkness at mid-day, melt into
the world of tantra without knowing what it means. Yes,
a nameless rose does smell as sweet. I’d forego the forever
my college sweetheart promised when he said he’d ask
my dad, like I was an 18th century commodity. I’d handpick
the same bouquet of brief eternities, still slam on the gas
pedal—my rose-coloured windshield shattered to pieces
when I travel to the final frontier to find the lights
in his Northern eyes out of order those nights. Kintsugi:
the Japanese art of repairing broken items with gold lacquer;
freesias swooning over the fallen vase—her slow dance of
shimmering scars. Given the chance, I’d still fling myself
off the shelf, bless the falls that broke me golden.

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Dré Pontbriand called us from Antigua & Barbuda.

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