Exercises

Unlike a certain City That Never Sleeps 
south of the border stretching sea to sea 
across my northern home and native land, 
the so-called City of a Hundred Steeples 
would almost always go to bed on time. 

Defying the New York borough of Manhattan, 
the downtown district once called Ville-Marie 
still tossed and turned in shallow restless slumber. 
Its faceless figures, lost to time, crossed shadows 
throughout the empty streets of Montreal. 
They all exchanged curt nods while hurrying by 
without a short Salut or quick Ça va. 

Where those few wanderers went, I cannot say. 
Among them, floating like a flickering specter 
cloaked by my own admitted nondescription,
I claimed the city in my nightly haunt.
Three million habitants were fast asleep, 
but I stayed wide awake, up and about,
and kept its rows of streetlights company. 

Looping around the block on Sherbrooke Street,
two cigarettes consumed all as per usual,
my walking took me back on Durocher 
toward my studio apartment in the ghetto 
where students and professionals alike 
lived lives in parallel — in constant passing. 
My un et demi, as all the locals knew it, 
was where my frenzied writing would resume. 

Kept going by the taste of nicotine, 
I typed into the same Word document 
until I went to bed and lay my head, 
with hair unwashed, onto a flattened pillow. 
My overworked computer’s fan unheard 
when I placed headphones over my two ears, 
I hit “Play” on my old cassette Walkman. 
The same piano recording as every night 
lulled me to labored, troubled, desperate sleep.

Remember this, dear stranger: this is not 
an empty hypothetical within 
the kerning between the letters in a word, 
the whitespace in the wake of paragraphs, 
the margin bounding all a page’s text. 
When the June solstice came and went that summer
in ’99, I had not worked in months. 
I had some savings in a bank account, 
a cheap roof over my head that did its part, 
and personal effects amounting to no more 
than books and clothes I squeezed into a suitcase. 

I was a living being of flesh and blood 
choosing to live the millennium’s final year 
as yet another solitary witness 
to the waning age and unseized day.