East Hastings and Main

Gastown

Sun Ah Hotel

Crab Park

Everyone’s cold and scared.

Scrawlings in the back place speak of heroin hidden. This is a place, the kind that looks dark, where you can mistake trees for shadows depending on what bipolar plane you’re looking at. Where you think branches are charcoal. The Eastside, a place where you look back so you can look forward.

This is not a place where consciousness can be placed as a brick, but it is a place of threes: systematic piss and prick and alleys. There’s happenings, invisibilities, easiness, and pipes that invoke a glitch.

Red like scaly rabbits that breed sores in a place black.

Blue is where one talks.

Cheap skyline. Vancouver and of you. Coffee up. Quiet. You are in the clouds. Mortar brick, cheap. Water, rent, beckons of Diet Coke cans in diners that stirs, that benefits. Sometimes, at Vancouver Harbour, someone can see it all coming in amidst the choppy deafening grey.

Rally, comfort from some plastered poster — paper doesn’t blush — on every telephone pole. The publicity, the glamour.

Purple smoggy, on days that the dusk has a hue.

Settle the women as they attempt business with hollow-faced men who walk.

The cold creates an edge typical. Damns are taken. Why? is thought. Why not step off somewhere?

Tourists have a different motive entirely, they walk as if it’s a zoo, as if everyone who lives there is entertainment, meant to be gawked at, men and women different enough to be nobody.

Some people may go fast, some think they are ghosts, some have a fear and therefore crawl because they can feel implants.

There are some who smear their eyeballs as with lipstick and happenstance, the moon red with blood, dark as a youth who blushes and spatters, for they see dreams of blue farms and undiscovered fragments of pink girls, girls who make statements of skulls who see shadows. Tomorrow, may be bold and may be red.

Everyone here is creased like paper, the girls’ skin applicators failing at their job.

It is getting darker, darker still.

The vampires come out, eating themselves.