'What Did You Do On Your Weekend In Vancouver?'

Walked with the traffic-stream over a high
humming bridge: airborne

before a strange city, its lives
crystallised, flickering with intelligence.

Backcloth of ashgreen mountains,
tangerine dusk, all the colours of elsewhere.

The voices whispering you should be 21
not 41  I crumpled up and let fall

over the rail, little bits
of flotsam that would find me later.

Sat at the window in Kitto's Japanese restaurant,
wrote nothing worth writing, thought

nothing worth thinking, unless it was
"I'm here... here... here..."

(shadowface ghosting the glass)
held by the carnival of passing faces,

their tanned legs, their many hairstyles.
When it came down to it, did nothing at all

but come down to earth, in the air,
finding myself at last on a bridge

into a strange city.

	-- Mark Granier