The year has barely started and we are already wondering what 2025 will look like. Will artificial intelligence end up replacing accountants, graphic designers, journalists and mathematicians? Mind you, for math, I wouldn’t be sad. It made me sweat so much when I was a teenager. And the poets? I can hear you laughing from here. If AI is so resourceful and insightful, it could write verses as beautiful as those of Sylvia Plath or Myriam Cliche, right? I ask ChatGPT to write me the most beautiful poem possible:
Words, like velvet butterflies,
Touch the soul,
Awakening dreams of love.
Wonderful, I shouldn’t lose my job this year. I listen to John Coltrane while walking on the sidewalk. Each saxophone note mixes with the snow beneath my boot soles. I crush numbers: a thousand snowflakes, for example. I go around pedestrians. I escape tears. This happens to me more and more as I get older. Tears are worthless here. They do not lower the cost of living. I should do a study on this. There are so many studies. I jump over a snowbank. I receive a notification from Hydro-Québec. Three hundred and seventy dollars for heating to live in a two-story four-and-a-half. I’m thinking of building an igloo in my dining room. I’d be warmer like that. The number of slaps in the face we endure in a lifetime. How much is a slap in Canadian money? The number of snorts we receive at birth, growing up between the kitchen and the living room, at school, at our first summer job, at our first heartbreak, at our first bereavement… Three hundred thousand ?
Your sweater disappears
Your smile
He’s there :
It’s the low light.
I walk into my apartment, it’s cold, and I say to myself, “I have to start this column on the relevance of poetry. » I make myself a coffee. I watch an ant emerge from a crack in the floor. Nothing surprises me anymore. She looks like an old drunk coming home from a bar. I boil myself a soft-boiled egg. I eat it with a little pepper. I give a small piece to the ant. I decide to name it Timothée Chalamet. For an hour, I looked for my sunglasses, but I couldn’t find them. I wrote a poem about it:
Winter divides me into four
It’s safer like that
While people work hard
And go to war
I lose my sunglasses.
I take a long nap on the couch. I wake up in total darkness. I look at the time: 4:27 p.m. My ant is still there. I’m afraid she’s dead, I gently touch her head. She moves and that relieves me. A new friendship is born with an ant. I have nothing left to eat in the fridge. The thermostats read 19 degrees. If I raise that to 20, I’m afraid it will cost me $10,000 and a kidney to Hydro-Québec.
Today
Brief conversation with my pants
Mystery
I’m not a man
I’m pretty tired.
I’m knitting a tiny wool hat for Timothée. I also make him six tiny Phentex slippers. I put her on my shoulder, I carry her everywhere with me in the apartment. In the news, there is horror everywhere: violence and hatred. Can poetry resist the slump and misfortunes of our time? If we close our eyes, maybe. At the same time, Rimbaud wrote: “We know how to give our whole life every day.” He is right. We know how to do that. I’m doing my grocery shopping. In the seventh row, a father makes his little daughter laugh by tickling her on the neck. It is a poem. If you take the trouble to walk around a little, you see poems like that a hundred a day. Poetry is the faint light that we see appearing under a door. It doesn’t save lives, but it’s there. It’s always like that. Timothée decides to return to living underground. Sometimes she comes back to keep me company for a few hours. Other times, she writes me messages on little pieces of paper. She explains to me how to go through each day as if it were the last. I’m putting numbers together. All the times I laughed out loud when my mother pulled me sledding down the sidewalks. What if this day becomes unforgettable?
I never know if I’m there
With a little effort
I can walk down this street
A smile ?
Maybe in a year
I believe in miracles
I believe in the sun in the morning
Around my head towards you.
Who is Jean-Christophe Réhel?
Born in Montreal in 1989, the poet, novelist and screenwriter Jean-Christophe Réhel won the Literary Prize for College Students in 2019 for What we breathe on Tatouine. His most recent novel, The joke of the centurywas published in 2023. He is the author of the television series The air of going, awarded at the Canneseries and broadcast on Télé-Québec (and still available on the broadcaster’s website as well as on Tou.tv Extra). His next collection of poetry, Taurus Taurusdue out in mid-February.