Dear Montreal

You are beautiful, really, but we must have a chat.

For nearly 5 years now I have been witness to your charms--the moonlight over your slim cousin, Saint Lawrence, stirring birds and beasts alike; your poetry, music to the streets at night, the sign posts and snow hills soiled with the print of human. Dirty, hard lucked; but music nonetheless.

However. The ease with which you judge your inhabitants harshly--in their dress, manner of being, the neighbourhood one lives in, or the amount of money one may have--is heartbreaking. Is this the air of the early poets who nominated the lonely walks of Montreal as intimate, rich, fierce? Are we not all of us Lords of Life?

My heart is heavy tonight, darling. I want so much to love you, your lights, your old walls and heavy ego. But there seems so often no place for my kind. Or rather, that I am invisible among thieves.

And so I retreat to your garden.
And I thank you for that.

You are a place one can disappear into. That's quite a feat, you, being merely an island.

Or perhaps it is I who remains the same,
wherever it is that I land.