In St. John’s, where the fog meets the sea,
there are those who sip pumpkin spice lattes
like they’ve discovered the essence of autumn
in a cinnamon-sweetened cup.

They glide through the streets
in electric cars, with a hum and a whirr,
like they’re saving the world one charge at a time,
never mind the fact they still litter the earth
with their discarded hot airs.

They crowd into gastro pubs,
where the menus are a riddle
of truffle oil and kale,
and they speak in tongues of quinoa and foam,
their accents thick with the taste of pretension.

Hot yoga studios are their temples,
where they bend and twist,
praying for flexibility
while their spirits remain rigid
in their carved, polished soft shells.

Their eyes, though sparkling with the sheen
of organic certainties,
fail to see the people
who live without irony or filter,
who work and sweat in the real world,
not in the exclusive enclaves of the artisanal.

To them, we are a curiosity—
the unpolished, the unrefined,
as if our lives were mere background noise
to their curated, Instagrammable existence.

But in our cracks and crevices,
where simplicity blooms,
we hold a quiet truth:
realness doesn’t need to flaunt,
nor does it need to preen,
it just breathes,
unpretentious and true,
like the salt-kissed breeze
off the rugged shores of our own lives.

-M. S Chandler