I saw a girl who looked a lot like you today.
I was reading Baudelaire on the tram, and really felt it,
you know, in my hangover coat reeking
of cigarettes, and my lips bloodied with last night’s wine,
and the painful thing in my skull, and of course
the weird mist clinging to the skyscrapers.
It was all terribly grim and modern.

Her hair was your shade of brown, wavier perhaps,
and hesitantly bouncing just above the shoulders,
like yours. We stepped onto the same platform
and she shimmered for a moment, face arch
and angled against the mist, clinging to the skyscrapers.
Her eyes were very dark, like from a book.
I climbed my building and thought of you.

Floating above Queen Street, in my office stuffed
with empty sheets of paper, I watched the aquarium
of molecular memos and love messages swimming
across the sky, winding through the tumbling buildings,
flickering past the neo-gothic clock towers,
over the squat bluestone relics which crouched
at concrete foothills. The mist was disintegrating.

My veins felt like they were lined with poison
and the sky slowly filled with thousands of thoughts,
great teeming clouds of them, huge boiling flocks
and none of them were mine and some of them
were yours, perhaps, aimed at other souls,
distorting light, thickening the air, blurring my eyes
and seeping through the glass before me.

I turned away.