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Sean G. Meggeson

Coldness from the bathroom window. Tomorrow’s touch, a cruel smile, an arousal, a reckoning, a testimony, an alimony for suchness.

Names like Leila, Laura & Lorelei. Euphony to me. Like footsteps at night sounding out revisions of a Montréal mist.

Suspicion wins over affirmation but not as a means to an end. As a means to never trusting the next email. As a way of avoiding a name that might better be labeled ‘animal’. Better than breathing. Better than something that spells the end of a performance.

Formulation of a false self feels fugal and determinate. Like fruit in a basket.

A car in an underground garage slows down the Krebs cycle like a spider only turns over with a bump start. The High Plains of Colorado are a dangerous and diaphanous place to be because there’s no horizon. There’s a vending machine. There’s a place to hem your trousers if you need it. Just like at MoMA.

Let me think in the same way as I did yesterday and call it art. Let me stumble for seeing. Give me a six-chambered heart and a Wrangler jean jacket.

Idiocy begins again. Denim fades with a California summer and reaches a beginning. I freeze like any Tom Fool who swims in the Pacific. My knock-off watch stops. I’m not sure why but I take rose gold for tenderness. I would eat it if I could. That much I know.

Dr. Frankenstein should have loved his monster into a livable life. It was only a little neurosis that was the cock up. It was only bad wiring. Like loving the wrong millisecond with thousands of rat feet dancing on the periphery.

I spent a lot of time working on a family motto only to beat my brain into discovering it’s better to titrate in the dark.

Get this, the darkness is a cloth that wipes a stain out of existence.

I suffer without music.

I simplify archives with a stopwatch.

I curry a sadistic impulse to hard-win against loneliness. Everyone asks what that looks like on the ground. I can’t look them in the eye.

I open my eyes and you’re not there so I sluice my thoughts and see two trout in a stream
loving each other into white noise. Twyla Tharp perfecto, a Monk dance of twisting fish, like a long, sorry spine, like the Barbary Coast line.

Get this, I’m crying with surplus knowledge.

I want to change my name to Archie Goodman. Someone once told me a name with many vowels makes you a mensch.

I want to say goodnight but that’s an end. That’s a name. That’s a basket and I can’t wash my feet in a basket.

It’s far too late and I’ve had too many already to enjoy the wine.

M’boy brings me water, water, water.

About the author

Sean G. Meggeson is a poet and audio/spoken word artist living in Toronto. He has been published in a range of journals and magazines, including IceFloeThe Queen’s Quarterly, and Version(9)Magazine. He has published three chapbooks: Cosmic Crasher (Buttonhook, 2024), soma synthesis (lippykook, 2025), and ta o, j (lippykook, 2026). His full-length book of poems is titled, (primitive press, 2026). Sean won the League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Award in 2024, and his spoken word and soundscape album, Liminal Animal is forthcoming. Sean works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice with his canine co-therapist, Taotao.