A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. I

There is a problem in this city. It is not with the roads. It is not with the buses. It is not with unemployment. It is with how we treat our youth and the people that take care of them. The youth of which I speak are the kids that are in your schools, in your rec centres, in your starbucks and in your youth groups. They are the youth that are in the system, but whether we see them or not, they are in our lives. They have been ripped from their homes by forces that they don't fully comprehend. They have been shaped by choices that are not their own. They have been made into people they are not entirely by their own will.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that society ate, chewed and spat out, left to their own devices. They are the youth that get into gangs. They are the youth that have access to drugs. They are the youth that sleep on our streets. They are the youth that have gone missing. They are our invisibles, well on the way to becoming invisible.

These are our youth.

They are the youth whose mothers passed on their crack addiction when they were born. They are the youth that were abused when they were babies. They are the youth that were left for days without food due to neglect. They are the youth whose faces are bruised by yet another of mom's boyfriends. They are the youth who were born with FAS. They are the youth that were ignored. They are the youth that were beaten without cause. They are the youth that were beaten for any cause.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that are strung out in an alley. They are the youth that break into houses to find something they can pawn so they can score another hit. They are the youth whose boyfriend left them with nothing more than a pregnancy. They are the youth that listened to the wrong man online and disappeared. They are the youth that cut. They are the youth that want to end their lives. They are the youth that can't control their anger, for a reason that they can't explain, because Daddy kept on hitting him when he was little and wouldn't stop crying.

These are our youth.

And we own them more than what we can ever give them.

We house them in grouphomes and foster homes and lock down recovery clinics. We commit them as patients of a hospital of societal illness, slaves to an impersonal system of beds and numbers. We house them with grouphomes that are understaffed and underpaid, with drywall full of holes, cracking lino, and burned out staff. We house them with foster parents and brothers and sisters, who opened their hearts to take yet another risk, another burden on the shoulders of the burdened. We give them case workers who are overworked. We house them in places that are ripe for tempers to fray, with easy access to others for drugs and gang inductions. We house them in the ghettos of our city. We house them without regard. We tell them that this is only temporary. We tell them this until they turn 18.

These are our youth.

We give them staff that are underpaid and told to care for them, and if they can, love them. We give them staff that are paid a pittance and train them in how to stop a kid from trying to kill themselves, how to restrain a kid that’s lost control of their temper. We give them staff that pull 48 hour shifts because there wasn’t anybody else to call. We give them staff that are paid less then someone working at the local Timmy’s. We give the staff six kids with different schedules, doctors, counselors, parole officers, support workers, social workers, teaching assistants, psychiatrists, addiction counselors, and ask them to juggle it all. We give them staff that are the anvil to the hammer that the world has beat into these kids. We give them staff that deal with the behaviors and the memories of the abuse suffered at a previous home. We give them staff that are asked to risk life and limb to some of the kids that are severely unbalanced. We give them staff that are expected to bind the horrific emotional wounds that abandonment causes. We give them staff that can’t work regular hours because it’s shift work, and doesn’t pay enough to hold down as a job. We give them a staff that cares, and then burn them out. We give them a staff that sees these kids for who they really are, youth who actually matter, and then fail to pay a competitive wage.

These are our youth. And these are our youth workers.

And we’ve forgotten about them.

Coffee

The black grind, the black rind

Dark as coal, Dark as kohl

Sinful and bitter as a cynic suckled on the

Fruit of a burnt scorched earth

The smell, the smell, oh gods, the smell,

A siren, a siren, and I give in.

My mouth, My mouth, the oil seeps in

A Styxian ambrosia

Ghetto Farm Kid

I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise

Of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity

where I have no choice but to breathe its gasoline fumes,

so different than the smell of diesel,

Wheat, and the hard honest sweat that you get

when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in

On a hot heavy day

I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay

My course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read

They inspired me, widened me, and taught

My mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around

Sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of

A chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields

where the harvest is coming in

And the row of combines marching in the lines

Of swath on a land like quilted cloth

With swatches of green and gold, a pageantry

As old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough

look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain

I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore,

I swore, I would travel, experience more

than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.

I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe

Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the

Desire to flee my own space, hearth and home

My feet were itchy, you see?

I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany

I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh

To my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care

For this city of the Bear

It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air,

In the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair

Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck

hung like a flag ready at the beck

And call of a protest at the Berlin Wall

Which had its fall not too long ago at all

You could feel the history in this city,

Sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag

Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag

From a World War where they exchanged

One dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged

In this city divided between East and West

You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest

Of a people who are charged with: Lest WE forget

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei

You can see it echoed in the eyes

The memories of a people who let the Jews die

But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age,

In questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,

There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create

A dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with

The willingness to encompass more than the limits of

of theology, nationality, and blind ideology

They taught me that it was ok to open my mind

to find conversation late at night in a coffee shop

Open far past the hour of closing

and well on the way to first light

I met the Prof, a man with salt and pepper hair,

Grizzled but with a statesman air,

He used to be an Anglican priest, ordained,

But found he was chained to the bedside

Of the old, and sought to find inside a faith that had died

So he came back to teach English to the senior high,

And to me, this English speaking guy,

A irony I saw and met with a grin, wry

He challenged my concepts, the hardened precepts

of a narrow neo-conservatism, airtight faith, trapped in the chasm

Of propaganda, and as he saw it - Indoctrination,

Opening the mind from the culture I lived in

I had to make the point, No... I'm not an American

So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty

For really good coffee and a company that delights

In the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far

From the plebeian woes of a city that has no personality

as far as personality goes

It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid

More Incoming

So, lest I forget my promise to post regularly, I've been writing poetry, that most maligned of art forms, and have a store of creative non-fiction that I've been working on over the summer. I'm in the middle of tranfering things over to my new mini-notebook (whose name is Sapphire, it's blue you see) from my old laptop (known as Sven) that I'm selling, and Brutus (my desktop tower of Doom, whose monitor is known as Svetlana).

I've got a manifesto to share, a exploratory meandering on the notion of worth as a Christian, and beat poetry as well.

It Feels Like Coming Home

I'm in English this year at the University, I'm returning to my first love, after a long absence.

It was that old familiar sensation that came back that surprised me. You know, the one that you associate with going back to school, cheesewagons, stale lunch bread, excitement and anxiety all at once.

It was nostalgic, no, it is like living through nostalgia. I'm in English this year, and it's like experiencing my first year all over again. I'm reminded of this as I walk into the first english class of the day, and the teacher is abstract random, like a certain boss I had over summer. I'm reminded of this by the characters that walk in, there's a girl with make up like a geisha, another that is epically Goth, a guy with wire rim glasses who wants to be a author, another, a student from Iceland. You can smell the subculture.

I keep expecting the smell of ozone stress and slight panic I felt all of last year when I was taking the sciences. Instead, I have readings in subjects I find fascinating, instead of nigh incomprehensible. Metaphor is my territory again, no longer am I wandering in the strange land of nucleic acids, Lewis structures and elimination reactions. Some parts of today felt like walking through a waking dream, waiting for me to wake up and realize that I'm on a path I'd turned away from.

I have poetry class next. Oh sweet simile, rapturous rhyme and rhythm!

Yeah, I'm a geek.

Six Months From Now...

Six months from now, I’ll be doing English papers on Shakespeare, and taking courses in Greek mythology, ethics, logic and religion.

Six months from now, I’ll be supporting myself by working part time.

Six months from now I’ll be learning how to draw better.

Six months from now, I’ll have an active blog, instead of month-long dead spaces.

Six months from now, I’ll be taking care of myself, doing what I love to do: which is writing and learning about the literature that has defined our culture, its beauty and depth.

Six months from now, I’ll be in the same place physically, but older, more mature, more joyous than right now.

In six months, I’ll be happy to make supper regularly with my roommate

In six months, my money (not anybody else’s!) will be budgeted to the dollar.

In six months, I’ll be seeing more plays than I’ve seen in the last three years

Sometime in six months, I’ll be playing video games, socially, healthily, and without guilt.

In six months, I’d have been a leader at camp, and an active part of that community.

In six months, I’ll be a catch.

In six months, I’ll be running 10k without stopping.

In six months, I’ll be closer to God, and to reality.

Six months from now, I’ll be fit, and able to beat my roommate in squash, like I once did.

Sometime in six months, I’ll either know how to blow glass, make glass sculptures, or learn how to work a forge.

In six months, my imagination will be expanded.

In six months I will be able to (and will) handle more responsibility.

Six months from now, my heart will not cry out in pain from hopes and dreams deferred.

Six months from now, I’ll be walking a path that I’ve should have walked three years ago.

The Pipe: Worldline

The idea of a timestamp is a curious one. It locks in a word, a phrase, a sentence typed into the temporal ether. You chat, you text, write an email, or a letter, and those words, those ideas suddenly have a place, in all four dimensions. It is no longer floating free. It becomes concrete, solid. Real.

I came across the idea of a worldline, and it struck me as poetic. You could say Einstein, who came up with the notion, was the poet of physics, and indeed the way he interacted with science was with an artist's genius. It goes like this: a worldline is the sequential path of something through both time and space, from the moment it is created to the moment of it's non-existence. A worldline is the string that binds us to place in this universe, as we know and see and perceive it. Invisible to the naked eye, but as real as the touch of the keyboard beneath my fingertips.

When we are gone, when we no longer exist, our worldines ended in this place, that string remains. A record of ourselves is left behind in some form or fashion. In the gametic DNA that we pass on, in our letters, or in some book. We weave together, one string ravelling into another.

A ship's worldline is it's log. It must contain the date and the position, and you can see the course that it charted through the brine and spray. This is my log, as small and insignificant as it is. This is where I can stamp my mark and say: Phil was here.