Some poetry, written by yours truly.
O Caml: A Sonnet
What spirit did awaken in my heart
When first mine eyes met thy recursive gaze?
How should I ever bear to be apart
From thy gentle lists and thy static arrays?
O Caml, let me plunge towards thy base!
And pray thee, lest my stack should overflow,
When thou bind’st me in thy function call’s embrace,
Ensure no computation doth follow.
How different can thy fine arrow-types be
From those of Eros? For my desire doth burn
As thou evaluatest eagerly
My wretched soul, a unit to return.
No other earthly language can compare,
And e’er I long to match thy patterns fair.
November 2019
Schulich 5
Number number = new Number();
Your number cuts my hand
That bleeds your name in an arabesque swirl
Of point-five Muji red
April 2022
Farewell McGill Ghetto
Bounded by Pine and Sherbrooke, Park and Peel: for four years—five if you dawdle, three if you’re smart or French or both—this is your world. It has been since the first torrid night you dragged your bags up University and it will be till the day they read your name in the graduation tent. They tell you to escape the Ghetto, and soon enough you find the courage to venture out. You picnic on Mount Royal, where raccoons wring their hands and make puppy eyes for your blueberries. You have Kem CoBa on the rainbow Fairmount benches, skate at Lafontaine Park, buy bagels on Saint Viateur, and discover the spherical delights of Montréal: the orange one in the west and the mysterious orbs so far north you might as well be in downtown Saint-Jérôme. But these things are not yours like the hot-dog man at the Y is; like the Burnside couch is after you drop your assignment into the tenth-floor box at three a.m.; like the Durocher skunk is, who leads you home after a drunken night; like The Word is, where you channel student-loan cash into books you won’t read and where, as we speak, two old men are having a loud conversation that foreshadows a leftist uprising. Yours too is the fieldhouse across Pine and if you close your eyes you’re there again blinking sleep away in a stream of clammy bodies it’s a seventy-percent final you could fail you could walk out three hours from now and have failed Please raise your hand and keep it raised if you do not yet have an exam. the river has emptied to form this great lake of a thousand students and here you’re sat a part of it you take your pencils out give them a few more twists in the sharpener for good measure Please raise your hand and keep it raised if you do not yet have an exam. your toes dance and your fingers quiver the thing ought to have started by now oughtn’t it but look: four rows down there she is your friend you wave in exchange for a smile a feeble smile because the solemnity of the occasion permits no more The exam is three hours in duration. It is nine oh-two. The exam has now started. You turn the page over and breathe.
June 2022
Winter Sunset
I mean those days on the prairie when winter needs neither wet nor wind nor storm to sustain itself and so exists—shining, glimmering, blazing—in stagnant perpetuity, when the cold seems to come from within your very soul, the frost of you spilling out and pooling with the frost of the world. The winter that reigns on these days is one that smiles bright and harsh, that does not operate under cloak of shadow or justify its blows with clouds of gloom. On such clear days when night arrives it rises from all directions as a purple-orange fog, salvation in the form of a palliative void, its darkness no longer light’s opposite but instead inheriting the violence of a cruel, icy sun, and when the earth sinks into its frigid depths it does not fall into the clutches of the hostile, but remains under the vicious tyranny of the same.
April 2023