Through a microscope, I watched the time pass — The ways that it comes and it goes — And magnified till I could feel every second Crawl in and out through my bones. I watched for so long that time lost its meaning, I watched as the time burned away — Till the shape of an hour, the color of seasons, And each moment were one and the same. In time, I lost track and forgot I was watching, And quietly lifting my head, I realized that time was all but behind me, for death had come in its stead. ~ February 11, 2021 Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Québec City

Life is moving in slow motion, the world is still outside my window — the sound of the trucks collecting snow, and the sound of my neighbor’s radio come in from the street and up through the floor to greet me in my silence. Somewhere, the sun is pouring across the clouds; somewhere, the grass is green; and my apple by the window is rotting, like me — although I cannot see it now, I know it must be. ~ March 1, 2021 Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Québec City

Empty wine glass and coffee, my forlorn desk — I leave for food, into the strange world, old Rue Durocher, one foot following the other down freezing late October sidewalk. There is no more night crying now, just discarded blue masks in the street trash looking up remindingly. There is no more night music either, only empty chairs on stoops where summer used to sit, and I, in just my company, took for granted, it. I knew love on this street — finding glances out the window, and sounds outside peripheral to us then, echo now across Durocher in a winter without friends. Returning, quietly I eat, looking around at everything I’ll leave. Across the room I see myself looking back from a better day — I match his gaze and return it defiantly. ~ October 29, 2020 Park Ex, Montréal

These days, all I can hear is the quiet tick of the second hand as 1 p.m. becomes 1 a.m., the sound of my breathing — My plain black particle board coffee table is adorned in pizza crust crumb cutting board, crumpled Spanish transcriptions, incense ashtray full of yellow wood sticks and brown gray ash, a greasy plate with a Pogo stick resting against the lip like a cigarette, bought en rabais at the fluorescent lit acid-yellow Maxi where I spend my evenings sleepwalking — bought out of a year-old dried out nostalgia, to relive some old memory alone — William Carlos Williams looks across the coffee table calm and unblinking from his mid-century soft cover towards the other half-read books — what good is it, these new ways of saying the same old things? Ô sadistic winter, how many times shall you bury, dig up and rebury autumn in your lonely frozen grave? My cheap table is crowned with things unfinished. My apartment rocks as the frosted-glass head of the neighbor bobs past my window and tramples on down the stairs into that frosted-glass world. My last love, you come to me in fleeting blurred visions in the space between my ears in sleep and in curly haired apparitions you visit me in the faces of others — we’ve said our final words, our time has been interred, there is little left to remind me of you now… These days, my apartment reeks of the choking odor of varnished floors, and I dream of third hand cigarette smoke and jasmine oils seeping from the electrical outlets. My apartment shakes with saws and drills and hammers and I find myself missing the mumbling of my neighbor’s radio in my last home in Québec City where I wandered in daydreams, sick in worry, perched upon the holy sloping streets of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. These days, the radio speaks of curfews and war through the shower curtain. I’m shadowed in December’s gray sun, left to caulk my walls and scrub my dishes, collecting dust mites, inventing plans — I’m wondering when life is really supposed to begin. PL is dead. The book he recommended to me still sits unfinished by the bottles of vitamins on the particle board coffee table. It took me weeks to find it. I’ll never get to tell him that I read it. I’ll never text the number I saved in my phone, next to a first name only, for when he moved into town. These days, no matter what I try, I can’t feel anything. If I were a genre of music, I’d be post-feeling. I have squeezed out every last saccharine drop from solitude and now suck its dry and bitter rind. I’ve walked the blocks from hazy August to muffled white flat December as though walking will shake my branches and make fall some last iota of inspiration. All my fruit has fallen and lies fermenting — fodder for the birds. Things don’t feel the same as they used to. Life doesn’t feel the same. These days have been quiet. When the sun takes leave, I don’t even remember to turn on the lights. ~ December 16, 2021 Rosemont, Montréal

Dear Robert, where do you wander now? Do you look out over rooftops and wonder where else there is to be? Do you still pace along the Liffey and sit around in saintly Greens? Do you still take the train to the seaside where we looked out to Holyhead on the pale horizon, fought off seagulls and exchanged our lost time? Does smoke still billow out your chimney or have you finally kicked the habit? Do you still hallucinate in lofty country mansions? Do you quarrel with your lover? (Do I ask too many questions?) Dear Robert, your old bed awaits you with wrinkled sheets — crow’s feet of dusty pillows — your old dog’s coat is gray-tipped, she sighs and wonders when her master will return. (Perhaps she wonders if you ever were at all.) Dear Robert, bittersweet is the fruit of our harvest — how many years have passed since we uprooted and sowed the seeds of our perennial departure? Dear Robert, the ground is livid with fiery autumn — her wind wails to mourn your absence and throws leaves about in tantrum. My world is ablaze — you set fire to the earth, stole away and let it burn. Dear Robert, am I lost in our antiquity? Time will not forgive us but I hope you can forgive me; I can’t remember how much time has passed — how many years older will you be? Dear Robert, my old receipts have all but faded; wedged between poems, my vanishing souvenirs. Dear Robert, bold and emphatic, I’m not quite sure what to say. ~ June 25, 2021 Québec City

My fair May, you’ll surely part, so I’ll love you while you’re here and listen to each note you sing, resolute and clear. My fair May, you’ll surely part, as someday, so will I; but you’ll go on forever and I will surely die. ~ May 24, 2021 Québec City

Little fish carcass, lying, decapitated and dirty along sidewalk Jean-Talon by the underpass concrete below the torn posters, Where is your head? Where is your water? Who kicked you into the weeds? Little fish carcass, pitiful severed tail which I mistook for a pigeon carcass on my way home, What did you think when that hand raised you from the water? What was your last meal? Little fish carcass, rotting beneath rusting metal of cold November city, you are far from home. How many friends did you have? What were your priorities? What did you see, in life? Little fish, you made me sad on my sunny walk home. Little fish, which hand will take me from my water? ~ November 4, 2020 Park Ex, Montréal

The inside of my eyelids is a film I can’t turn off — I’m back in Montreal, three apartments ago, cooking eggs after class in September by an open window, the leaves are turning shades of ochre — I’m in a diner near the hospital, watching the waitresses serve blue drinks and burgers — I am 13 — I am in the parking lot — I’m picnicking with Olivia on a grassy riverbank, someone’s private property — she ashes her cigarette as I look over my shoulder — I’m at my grandparents’s house, listening to the world move — mom is on her way — the taste of the ice cubes — I’m in preschool asking a classmate if orange he glad I didn’t say banana in a blurry hall outside an invisible classroom — the lattice in the pathway — I’m quiet and empty, staring into my paper plate — my new relatives dance below the string-lit rafters of the barn — I’m on a dock in Maine watching dad smoke a cigar under the lamps as we both look out, wordless, at the sleeping harbor — a celebrity has died — I’m on Robert’s porch, a coyote sings through the moonlit pines, the Milky Way glistens between the branches — our tea is ready — I am stoned — I’m walking down a beach in January with Zoe and her dog who runs ahead — the winter waves of a quiet Atlantic — I’ve seen this film, I’m in it now. I understand, There’s nothing I can do. ~ February 21, 2021 Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Québec City

La mer éphémère des souvenirs dormants, moi et l’horizon bleu — petit navire bercé par la brise sous la voile de mes pensées perdues. Quand, soudain, le soleil a trouvé mon sommeil et s’est déposé sur mes yeux, le mât est tombé et mon corps étiré était projeté dans le flou. Écrasé par les vagues orangées, lourdes et douces, et au bout de mon dernier souffle, moi, satisfait de m’être noyé, j’ai dormi une heure de plus. ~ February 7, 2021 Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Québec City

In April, or maybe May, past the metal gate at the end of the dirt road which I had seen out the bus window many times, and always wondered where it ended, privately, we each looked around to make sure we were alone. The grass of a quiet field beneath our feet, curved down towards the mute valley past the water tower and the horses (miles away and a decade past, now, it is a groundhog on the hillside, and the white tanks of an oil refinery across the river). We spoke quietly, our voices carried across the silence and the low, unmoving clouds, and I reached out to touch your sweater, and felt your waistline meet my palm. In a moment as in any other, your lips, as of any others I’d known, met mine along the hillside uncharted for us both. The blurred kiss in that moment field, the first letter of a question which, miles away and a decade past, I still ask myself from time to time. ~ April 14, 2021 Plaines d'Abraham, Québec City

“Time is moving on without me —” “but you’ve been through a lot! it takes some time to disinter oneself from anxious thoughts.” I guess I should be patient as everybody says, and disregard this feeling that I’ve reached some kind of end. Though I’ve grown accustomed to the inside of my door; the way a year just disappears isn’t novel anymore. Five years of obsessions made me underweight, which, in turn, brought a headache on for twenty-five days straight. And though it has subsided, now the din of my own breath and the deafening sounds inside my head are all my ears accept. So now I’m eating protein to get back function in my ears so that I may hear again the rush of passing years. And when I get back to the city I’ll resume life as it was; gaunt and isolated, reading prose in Maisonneuve. ~ August 14, 2021 North Brookfield, Massachusetts

“This is nice,” you said, smiling, and it was — the lily pads and the cattails bobbed and bent to the birdsong and the cicada’s hum, and we laid, calm and content, below an incandescent sun. I turned to smile back at you as you ran your fingers through my hair, but you froze, and I watched, helpless, as you began to disappear. The sounds around us faded into a too familiar stillness, the sun melted into the treetops, the whole bright world extinguished but for one dim electric ember and a rectangle of light which blistered my blurred vision and sickened upon my sight. When I refocused my eyes, I found your perfect smiling face fixed in two dimensions in a dark and empty place. Outside my window, I heard drunk friends laughing, and, as I listened to the sound, you slipped out of my fingers and fell heavy to the ground. ~ August, 2020 Park Ex, Montréal

And so, come December, Without a song to sing, I’ll look back and remember, My melody, my Spring. ~ November 4, 2020 Park Ex, Montréal

Condemned to death! A promised year filled with emptiness. Convicted of dealing in counterfeit dreams and fraudulent promises, and for thefts committed under the guise of auspiciousness. This year will be executed for its crimes in the morning’s early hours between warped hardwood floors and thin mumbling walls for none to see and buried beside bony arms beneath my pillow. ~ Revision of an old idea, February 16, 2022 Rosemont, Montréal