Tuesday 5 November 2013

2 New Poems

The Way It Ends Up

You said with the cigarette swirl, demonstrating
flight routes, the shape of Prague's astronomical clock
chimes and everything you remembered about Copenhagen,
that, “you still end up eating Subway sandwiches at
uncleared cafeteria tables, you still end up in some
corner with pens, paper and regrets, nursing an
overpriced Pilsner and tracing your fingers on the
edge of a Lonely Planet pull-out map.”

You know I'd be one of those people in Beaches
one day, growing a front porch garden, painting
siding colours that would huff-up the Etobicoke
Homeowner's Association, voting New Democrat out
of a vague sense of guilt, and talking too much
about Joni Mitchell and Neil Young in some
flicker-light barroom on some street without proper
signage I'd take three calls to direct friends to.

And I knew you'd live in Little Portugal or
Chinatown, chain smoke cloves out your
window above an all-night noodle house,
try to drown out your neighbours with lutes and
piano keys and thrift shop swing records,
skating on frozen town fountains and handling
out anarchist newspapers to businessmen on Bay Street;
clutching something of a future past to remind,

these white-walled and too-bright cafeterias days
are only a phase, were only a phase.



Lyrics To An Unpublished Song

The blue and red light bouncing from greasy cobblestone,
from brick walls where we'd had close calls with love
behind pub letterings and language law compliant
street signs, looked as heavens' infinity,
revolving in time to breathing sighs, slurred words.

Skating on river-thin ice, lakes soft in
the centre were our two forms in repetition,
and you with the same things you said every Friday,
that every girl I didn't get wouldn't be the
ones I'd have loved the best, anyways.

In impossible movie theatre distances, buzzing crunch
in the fizz of soda bottles and the short-selling of
popcorn scarfing lads, I'd inch a bit, this and that,
read as card player's do in projector's all blue
reflection: you were as radiant, blinding, as ever.

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