You can’t subject the bagels to
scientific inquiry - my
reasons for loving, neither.
My logic for my headaches is grey as my Atlantic sky,
my logic for my heartbreaks is blue as my Atlantic blood,
not 100% accurate, but

You can keep your twiddly, be-ribboned Mozart!
I’ll saw the head off a Wagnerian thunder god to play
a little Monsieur Croomb, Echoes of Autumn or songs about whales -
disreputable spectacles through my inch-thick lenses
not 100% accurate, but
pretty

I met my ginger doppelgänger
down a dead-end street in Montreal.
We traded glances, unspoken approval,
the knowledge that where the galleries are amazing,
the sad times are shit
not 100% accurate, but
pretty damned

I’m eating edamame and
emailing a time traveller from the 1920’s,
cursing in wingdings, watching from the margins.
This isn’t any kind of rebellion,
this is me, learning how to be happy;
not 100% accurate, but
pretty damned good.

Today I will honour the plumbers and the architects, the nurses and the dressmakers and the surgeons and the stay-at-home moms. Today I will honour the teachers and the artists, the office administrators and mail-people, the carpenters and the landscapers, the soldiers and the street-cleaners, the shelf-stockers, the baristas and bartenders, the construction workers, the telemarketers, the theatre technicians, the inventors, the CEOs, the project managers, the designers, the electricians, the packaging technicians, the athletes and the advertising copywriters and the machinists and the customer service representatives. Today I will honour everyone who has done whatever they could to help the world in its becoming, but no, I will not wear a poppy.

Do you know?
I was never in love with him, and
it is embarrassing, but
I am still
fascinated by a large nose and
drawn to a brown eye;
that wiry frame, scar and
smile lines still imply
‘catalyst’ still imply
‘a great deal under the surface’ still imply
a warm spine, a
flushed cheek, a
difficult question.

she talks like a river, all
vowels and rolling ars,
husband sprawled across her seat,
the occasional grunt to
keep her current

and I,
I can’t understand a single word, but
she talks like a river

but I walked into your clean love,
the smells of soap and acrylics
I know what it is to know
someone who wanted to know what I had for breakfast
and how the raisin bran, the scrambled eggs worked out
and I wasn’t quite ready for that, still
working out why you called me pretty,
why you called me