Vancouver: After the Crash

It is summer 2009, after the September Riots. Vancouver has just been destroyed by an earthquake, and is now an island. VANOC claims the Olympics will go ahead, despite heavy damage to venues. International aid is sparse as the world deals with the collapse of the American Economy, triggered by the assassination of its first black president whose economic isolationism caused China to sell off its Treasury Bonds.

Someday your steps will become crowded
Your angles shaved down
Your steel grip loosened by curious roots
Massive meeting halls made from the remnants of stadiums
Wrought-iron twisted into playful shapes
Rain-water collecting purposefully amongst the rubble
Families huddled under the ominous green-glass glow of empty condos
The tyranny of geometry ignored by gangs of wild children
Carrying new flags, new dreams, swinging wildly on loose-ends
Spitting at passers-by

Gardens soften the soil where rigid forms once crushed the regolith
Tomatoes grow exhausted under the windshields of wrecked cars
Pull the paint from the wood, lay down with the coloured stakes

We sail on makeshift Gondolas down city streets
And take a minute to remember Venice
Past fences where food-lines stretch
Our hair's grown wild and well-oiled
Crowning the backs of our soft skulls
With ultraviolet halos.

Gangplanks stretch across murky sloughs
Ad-hoc boardwalks clamber across the shells of broken homes
New maps, new tomes.
Living at last those dreams dreamt up by HP Lovecraft
Half-awake and hungry
Violent rays of incandescent light stab downward into
The dark, velvet, underground.

Rusted red dumpsters turned on their side
Line the high water mark
The ocean is everywhere
Salt lines creep like capillaries
Up brick and coloured concrete
Creosote rafts and reclaimed post and beam wharves
Pilings made from telegraph poles
Everything is running on gas again
Its exciting to live again

The empty city stretches out like a campus in August
Heaving with urgency, ready to beckon the calvary
Basking in the neon-glow of future fires.