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
12h15
Montreal