Bohemian Dry Cleaners

The streets are too well-swept to be considered squalid
Perhaps it tries too hard to be
Bohemian

This clapboard ghetto sat behind
Spadina’s downtown – Chinatown

And it’s sad testament
That recent refugees
Disregard its cardboard seediness
And live elsewhere

Though old, old immigrants
Mainland Portuguese and Azores
Owners of cheese stores
Seem to live
Seamlessly
With new age wiccans, cyber punks
Under-performing performance artists
Under shopping at the
Butchers
Next to Reggae historians
Fishmongers
Milliners
Compassionate cannabis clubs
Hats

Too many bookstores
Too many strident coffee shops
Too many vegetarians
Of the proper sort
The punks who
Are too too polite
So all the grunge looks like it has been dry-cleaned

And if Toronto is New York
Designed by someone Swiss
Then Kensington Market
Is Amsterdam
Without the hookers and the water

Despite its smugness and its neatness
Its well preserved graffiti and its too too tidy soul
And even though it isn’t ugly
I love it anyway