Temporary? Insanity

Disclaimer: This is a serious and possibly disturbing post. My feelings won’t be hurt if you skip it, but I need to put this into words. Thank you.

Picking up my passport today required a trip into downtown Vancouver. This is a place that hurts my heart. I’m left physically shaken after every venture down there. I can feel myself tremble, and tears tickle the edge of my lash line, even as I type.

The contrast of the building housing the passport office and the street outside is overwhelming. Inside, a man plays the harp while shoppers meander from one designer shop to another. There is a clothing store with a reception desk, like a grand hotel. There is a chandelier, casting cool glittering light over the scene.

Outside?

So much sorrow and filth. So many perversions of what our life here was intended to be. There, a man, grey beard plastered against the side of his dirty face, ratty old green sleeping bag snugged up against the cold brick wall of the liquor store.

A large man, baby faced, in thin torn clothing, seeks shelter at a bus stop. He has a tattered grey blanket clutched against him. The watery afternoon sunshine provides little warmth, and the blanket not much more. I shiver, caught up in the vivid imagining of night fall and its consequences.

A young woman hurls herself into the street, twitching about nervously. I do not know what she sees, but it isn’t the cars narrowly missing her. She has been swept away to somewhere, somewhen.

I clutch at the steering wheel, but fail. Discover I had already done so. My knuckles are hard and white, and I feel a sudden flash of pain in my fingers. I want to weep. It would feel so very, very good to weep. To make that vain attempt at washing away the grit and gruesomeness that seem suddenly adhered to me.

I don’t permist myself. A foolish gesture, perhaps. Denying myself one comfort because they have none. And then I want to laugh at the absurdity of my reaction. Oh the drama! Poor Kim, so horribly afflicted by the sights and smells. Her poor hurting heart. Her poor prickling eyes.

She has a heart left to hurt and hope with. Suddenly, that seems a very precious thing indeed.

I wrote this poem when I was eighteen, shortly after a trip downtown during which I saw a man, dead, on the side of the road. Perhaps a shade overdramatic, but it would seem that not only my teenage self is given to such feelings.

Dirty Hands

I hate the way the sunshine
cripples the clouds at sunset
and birdlike shadows
sully the grass

Everything is shaken
till walls turn ground
and memories spill tinkling
onto the raw wet street

that line
that underside of cloud
tears the shroud
till faint tinkles fill my soul with crashing

I can feel those hands
dirty hands
touching my heart to breaking
I would have thrown it all away
to paint the world clean
would tear it to pieces
to forget what mere clouds
mere shadows touch on

the man on the street
singing his swan song.
shades of purple black
scouring his soul clean
his hands clean
as the gutter welcomed him
down
home to heaven