In the southwest end of Scarboroughtown
Behind the bar and fitness club
Where wallets empty,
Sweating in shorts, betting on sports;
You’ll find a dim-lit den of misery.
Festering residue of un-exported Industry
Hidden from passers-by.
Small wonder why,
Who wants to buy
Tired exhalations of lives fading by?
All the colours of Benetton
United by a white-picket-fence lie.
*
Sicily to Saigon to Colombo to Kabul;
A catalogue of victims of history.
Every few years, ruddy men in green fatigues,
Beaters in a Medieval hunt
Drive the bomb-frightened game
Into their abattoirs of aspiration.
The terror of hunger makes for docile hands,
Tremulous in gratitude,
To stitch the fabric, fry the food, scrub away the feces
Cheaply, with a Smile.
One needn’t give a warm welcome
When the guest has nowhere to return to.
*
Walls stained by decades of profit black,
Sewing machines hum, staple-guns click-clack.
The only windows
Sleep-craved imaginations,
The only song
The hacking of Jazz-Tex-encrusted lungs.
The Victims of History each earnestly conducting
A human sacrifice,
Seeking to bless their children
With certificates of exemption
From life as bipedal oxen.
*
Shudder,
Grateful I did not have to learn
How to console a heart
Too tired for dreams.
Snow to Sand: Poetry, Stories and Musings from Canada, the Caribbean and Ukraine 
A lot of people believe that all of the industrial manufacturing in and around Toronto (besides a few automotive plants) was offshored decades ago. This is not true. There are quite a number of factories, producing all manner of goods, from cardboard, to packaged foods, to mattresses, which are tucked in away among the strip malls, car dealership and apartment blocks in districts like Etobicoke and Scarborough. Most all of these run on what’s now come to be called “precarious labour” – temp and extremely short-term contract labour, almost entirely immigrants from third world countries, usually highly educated but reduced to doing menial, insecure physical labour in exchange for minimal wages and nonexistent benefits…quite the opposite of what they were led to believe immigration to Canada would be like – and was like, in generations past.
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