I didn’t mean to burn the toast or cry
in public; I didn’t mean to spend the party
sulking on a stranger’s icy balcony
or wasting all my ex-friends’ new friends’ time

on lies they won’t remember by the morning.
We wandered to the driveway at eleven
and I got mean, then I cursed out every twig
that snapped between the frozen coughs of wind

and every groan of every owl, but you
stayed back when I bent to tie my shoe
and the moon glowed like a fist and my fist
turned all the colours of a mirror, and I swore

that even in the hollow of my rib
I knew I always wanted all the noise;
I’m too afraid to sit still and pray

that the day I die will be as uneventful
as the first day of my life: quiet snow
that blisters down in a wide and sweeping arch,

solid in the mind but strange for April
in Toronto, breath gone white and slow
and cold, someone waving from the porch.