Pain and Wastings

A city tour bus from Vancouver’s air port slowly drives through Main and Hastings

Women look like witches in Polanski’s Macbeth

Men as starved vampires

Shuffle down East Hastings as though with feet of clay

Some hide in the shadows of the Carnegie Library

Lighting up their crack pips or shooting up herion

Their drugs try to bring them to Heaven

But they only wake up in the DTES of Hell

On beds made out of cardboard

They sleep, shit, piss, fuck in the back alleys

Screams of pain and waste

Wake me up at 3am

I hate them but pray for them in one breath

Looking out my small bachelor apartment window

Under looming darkness

They light up their crack pips and shoot up their heroin

As a little piece of their souls burn into the night.

A version of this poem was publish in MEGAPHONE, Vancouver’s Street Paper

Issue 62/ September 17th 2010

June 2, 2010
Categories: Poetry . . Author: Henry Doyle

1 Comment

Pingback by V6A 1A1: Love Your Ghetto. Can you be a tourist in the Dowtown Eastside? Or are you just slumming? « VERY ETHNIC on February 22, 2012 12:49 pm

[…] Same corner. (Yah yah, “Pain and Wastings.”) Likely it’s grey. The drizzle is cold. If you’re lucky this will be the Wednesday […]

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