We spent July on Sketch Corner.
Us now vegans, with serotonin
supply vacuums and electrified synapses.
We were hatchlings growing ecstatic
in the awning of corporate coffee shops.
Needle dispensers and no service policies.
We just wanted to use the bathroom.
Record ourselves on Speakers Corner
and remember something about grade nine
that fit in an Irving Welsh novel.
Cobain was barely four years cold
everyone wanted to know if Love did it.
It was harder to buy beer than cocaine
and fun fur was high fashion.
There is no wax poetic. My nostalgia
is a poppy on a sharp silver pin.
I wear it like a battle wound in November.
Some raved in peyote forests swallowing fireflies.
Our roundhouses held young men on meth and
pixie dust pre-teens between a few clean dancers.
At least that’s what I remember. I don’t remember much.
Peace, Love, Unity and Paramedics.
The corner of Queen and John was once exposed
in Maclean’s Magazine by a man in his thirties
who mistook party names for music genres.
We stood taring the glossy covers to confetti
while the sun opened her jaws on the concrete.
Some mothers sitting like gargoyles in bed
our names their spouts of water.
In the galaxy’s heart at Sketch Corner
under a rain of Maclean’s flash and glitter,
pupils big as heavenly bodies.
We smoked morning cigarettes like track horses,
compassion just a word we knew.
No one had told us about the glue factory.
We were making
our collective broken heart
famous.
Survival looks like this, sometimes.
A dancing millipede on the city’s centrifuge. Disobedience
just obedience to a new father. Children
hanging up their names like winter coats. A few deaths,
legislation. Two few listening to the choir
paint arias of accusations. We need change now.
They swallow disreality like vitamins.
The Glue Factory (6/31)
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