I am twenty-three when I hear your name,
the same age you were on the bus that day,
shooting down the city, towards Frontenac, where it would be only a short walk 
to the hospice.		

Those long tubular bulbs, mothless, phosphorescence pooling, puddling your cheekbones, 
your diaphragm tugging, making a marionette of your wilting frame—
the coda no one sees coming.	
				
Elsewhere, a doctor is prescribing abstinence.
Church and State are nodding off together; apathy heats the tub; 
they fall asleep with upturned noses.

They do not take pleasure seriously, but you,
Joe Rose,
you knew that pleasure was the only sacred thing.
						
It is 1989. Church knells are death bells and the government tells us to stop fucking. 
My parents haven’t met yet. I am not yet possible, feasible; and you, Joe, are not, either. 
On the bus and everywhere, you are swaddled in leather, pale.
You looked for lesions, and you found them.			
						
I trace the orange line to Berri, where it meets the green, where I am four stops from Frontenac. How 
close you must have been then, to being delivered. Instead, you are beaten,
stabbed, bleeding out on the bus, about to be a headliner, a catalyst, a martyr.			

They’ll ask if you tried trading silence for survival, if there was blood cascading from the red pond 
beneath your tongue, a geyser; your teeth, the knife. No.	
					
At the clinic, I am entirely possible.
A greying bear inoculates me against a pox that will lose its name. 
He holds my arm gingerly.
			
Later, I ride my bike up Saint-Dominique 
to meet a man I do not touch,
and who does not touch me.
We take our pleasure seriously.	

I want to ask him where he was
in 1989, if he ever met a boy from the suburbs with his name a colour, the colour of his hair, 
with cheekbones high as church spires.
But this is no place
to speak of the dead.