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 IceFloe, The 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, j (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.