Take an eight-cylinder engine down to Mission Street
and race the trains and lose every time. 

Take seven gravol tablets and wake up to ironic
cricket songs and the West Nile in your blood.

Place your work on your tongue and swallow slowly.  Sprawl
out on prairie tall grass; preserve it with your nostalgic lapses. 

Settle in St. Boniface; photocopy your lexicon and send
it priority post to the National Library. 

Wake up again to Winnipeg, on Mission Street:

Listen to the song of the grey city:
your entire family, the police officers, the trains, the teenaged cars,
the social workers, the safe houses, the scrap yards, the
playgrounds are crooning “disrepair.”