opulence in glitch

the leaf has fallen

This poem was inspired by my time in Toronto. A gaudy chandelier was blinking in an empty Hudson’s Bay, a company soon to be bankrupt, and I had just been complimented by a homeless lady, after she noticed I’d been a little frightened by her yelling. I think this little anecdote encapsulates a microcosm of Canada’s political/economic landscape in 2025, or what feels like its eschaton.

a chandelier flickers in the mausoleum
with gleaming granite floors
to an abandoned audience of one
simulacrum sun.exe falters // flatline
crisis veiled in vacuous silence

decaying wounds untreated—retreat!
only apoplectic screams of the vagabond
cry out the prophetic yearning
of the cowardly masses’ hearts

too timid to detach the dagger
from my throat,
survival of the anesthetized,
self-sterilized and autophagous
oh, the luxury of numbness
the fluorescent, antiseptic hum

nascent with belief in the obsolete
politeia, yet unborn,
an imagined nation miscarries,
its heartbeat drowned
womb sutured shut with bandaids
that uphold our cavernous rot

pre-term adults playing dress-up
with old toys and new corpses—
dilapidated, devoured youth
the end of an empire that never was