Max and Jenn were in our grade eight classes
and our grade nine classes,
but then, they were not.
Where are they? asked the teachers.
Whispers replied to one another in the back rows,
I saw them outside The Royal Anne.
They’re turning tricks. Doing drugs.
We blinked at one another that our peers
would make such choices,
muttered, How terrible.
We slowed down our lives to peer into the
accident scene of their lives
from a safe distance,
but did any of us go downtown,
and offer them a different option?
.
.
.
This is a forty-year old memory. Where are they now, I wonder?
Shawn L. Bird 
brutal. ❤
You could easily turn this into a song to be performed by Oblivious Newton-John. — Bad pun aside, you present an important consideration, and a timely lesson: Don’t just watch . . .
Yes.
Perhaps some of us, those who were actually friends with them did go speak to them, but I think they’d alienated folks by that point. Cut the bonds and then run free. There are consequences of ‘freedom.’
How easily it could’ve been us there instead of them…
It’s all choices. Action-reaction. Option-decision.
Indeed…and no way to know which choices will be made until we’re there making them. I’m grateful I was somehow steered away from a lifestyle like the one you mentioned in your poem.
Or used inate good sense?
When I walked among the people of east Vancouver, in July, 2015, I saw both despair and hope. Heart connections always matter.
Yeah. It’s scary there.
I always say Gordon Campbell has a lot to answer for when he closed the residential psychiatric facilities and didn’t provide better alternatives. The street population instantly ballooned, and hasn’t decreased since.
The structure and functioning of our society….