Chad Parenteau

You can always walk away.
You can leave your car behind,
hand him the chain, your finger
clutching the key to your house
in good faith. You don’t want
anything real added to your
fabricated record. You don’t
have to use your feet to run
away. Get on your knees and
look to his pelvis to guide
the way home or to the ground.
If he’s hungry, you can always
feed him your heart. The protein
and the blood are all he wants.
It’s what he’s supposed to get.
You can give it now or later,
but now is always better.
You can stop asking so many
questions, or any questions.
All orders are clear and never
wrong. And if any orders
seem to contradict, then do them
in the order heard, give in
to confusion then collapse.
Anything that gets you closer
to the ground. On the ground.
All we want is you on the ground.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston’s long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals including Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, and The Ugly Monster. His newest collections are All’s Well Isn’t You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the Boston Poetry Marathon.

This poem appears in Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival (The Chaos Section Poetry Project, Fall 2026). We’re sharing each poem from the collection individually over the coming weeks. You can read the full book or download the free PDF here.