comrades

        There are a group of men who clutter themselves over the heating grate on Dundas and Simcoe; a business corner converted into a shanty space. At the epicentre of the group are two soaks who have made the space their home; a heating grate covered with dust filmed blankets, stain spotted sleeping bags and fragments of old clothes. Strewn about the space peppered with cigarette butts were fragments of books, magazines, layers of spill stains, partially consumed food and miscellaneous wrappers.
        One of the men has rounded facial features; an expanding belly though not fat; bright blue bloodshot eyes and a fine layer of short silver and blonde hair that extended to his cheeks and drooped over his upper lip in a thick mustache. The other soak was a dust filmed man who had the discernible remains of an enviable chiseled build that was well into the process of erosion. Within this man�s squinty navy blue-eyed-thick-with-black-stubble-face was what looked like an abandoned, unwashed pre-teen who had acknowledged the uselessness of grief and the usefulness of resignation.
        From the shanty space, the pair shook their change cups and called out to the passers-by. They had a routine where one would panhandle while the other slept and switch shifts when not blissed out. �Blissed out� for their days were punctuated with sips and long pulls from unlabelled bottles, cooking sherry and mouthwash. Consequently a strong odor hung within the shanty space, a reek of innumerably consumed intestine dissolving chemicals perspired out of unwashed bodies where the smell of body odor was replaced with a more pungent chemical odor; like a terrible form of fermentation where the soaks and all those with them became the process they consumed.