Oh, all the words I should not know,
those doctors wrote on me,
swell up and thrum their syllables.
Won't let me get to sleep.
The sun will start late
and clock out early
and I'll drive around and wait for it.
Follow familiar roads,
emptied of every memory,
under a sheet of silence and unmarked snow.

Then idle in some parking lot,
smoke half a smoke and ask
St. Boniface and St. Vital
preserve me from my past.
Repair our potholes.
Prevent plant closures.
And if they remember me at all
make them remember me
as more than a queer experiment;
more than a diagram in their quarterly.
Make them remember me.