Elected officials, blinded by the false promises of Gambling to solve fiscal problems, ignore the costs and impacts, the human toll, lives destroyed. Maybe Beacon Hill should pay attention to Kevin Lyons.
Carrying his soul in his pocket
Forgotten 'Poet of Churchill Square' knows what it means to remember
Most people passing through Churchill Square on a bright autumn afternoon might not notice Kevan Lyons.
Sitting alone on a park bench, a ball cap pulled down over squinting eyes and a half-smoked cigarette hanging from his lips, he is just one of the many homeless people spending the day on the fringes of the square.
A man with a briefcase walks by without glancing over. A woman talks on a cellphone as she rushes past.
Lyons is almost invisible, but he doesn't mind.
"It's not about me," he says. "It's never been about me."
Lyons wants people to notice the Cenotaph outside City Hall. It bothered him earlier this month to see it dirty and in disrepair, a sign to him that the veterans it represents were being forgotten. Veterans like his father, who spent four years as a PoW in Japan, and all the others.
"It's dirty, it's black, it's covered in bird shit, and nobody cares," Lyons says. "Nobody cares it's there except for one day a year."
Lyons says he talked to city workers and called City Hall several times asking to get the war memorial cleaned up, but for a long time nothing happened.
After staring at the dirty memorial day after day, he turned his feelings of frustration into a poem. It helped.
Lyons, 58, has been living on the streets for four months.
It is a world away from the places he used to call home, some of them quarter-million-dollar houses that are worth even more now. He spent his first weeks on the
street sleeping in a cemetery, more comfortable resting among the dead than going to one of the city's homeless shelters.
"I'm too proud," he says. "I just don't want to go to the shelters. I'm stubborn that way."
Lately, he has been spending his nights in an unheated garage he rents for $400 a month, but he knows he has to find somewhere else to go. Winter is coming, and the garage will soon be too cold.
Lyons says he never wrote a poem in his life until four months ago, until everything fell apart, until his "crash and burn," when he found himself on the streets, homeless, with words inside ready to spill out.
"I found a soul," he says. "Poetry is my soul."
He touches a notebook, his fingers lightly tapping the lines of crooked black printing.
"This keeps me going."
The poems are with him always. He keeps a small notebook inside the breast pocket of his jacket beside two Gamblers Anonymous booklets, and he uses that one for ideas and early drafts. He has a bigger notebook in his bag for revisions, and another for finished poems. Those are the ones he likes, the ones he reads to people. There are 18 in that book, so far.
"Not bad poetry for an old man," he says.
Right now, the poems are nearly all Lyons has. He says poetry is the way he tries to deal with things that have happened in his life, the things that were his fault, and those that weren't.
He pulls out a thin wallet, takes out a worn picture of a little girl. Barbie.
"That's my angel," he says.
His daughter had problems from the time she was born, a malformation of the cervical vertebrae in her neck kept her in and out of hospital, but Lyons thinks more about how Barbie was always happy, how she never complained. He calls her his soulmate.
Her death was sudden. Lyons says he came home one day in 1995 and found her. She was 13 years old.
"I never got over it," he says. "Never outlive your children. Ever."
Some of the problems started there. It wasn't the cause, he says. Just another piece of the puzzle.
After Barbie died, Lyons became restless and bored. He had left a career as a real estate agent for a job as a property manager, and he started spending more and more time playing VLTs. He doesn't do drugs or drink alcohol, so he says he would go to family places, Albert's or Boston Pizza, where he could sit for hours sipping coffee and feeding the machines. He never meant to sit all day, but sometimes it just happened, and through the years it happened more and more. He put $1,000 into those machines more days than he can count, until he had gambled away $200,000 without ever setting foot inside a casino.
Once, he lost $8,000 in a single day. It was never enough.
Lyons faces criminal charges for theft and fraud, money he says he took from a friend to feed his addiction. He says his marriage of more than 30 years broke up because his wife couldn't trust him anymore.
"It's not her fault," he says. "It's my fault."
It's the things other people don't see that inspire Lyons most. He writes poems about people he meets on the street, about suicide, about the small garden at the side of Churchill Square. One poem is about his time sleeping in the cemetery, his nights spent with other people, dead and forgotten.
The Invisible Man poem is about Ken Monti, another homeless man who hangs out at Churchill Square. Monti still remembers the day he met Lyons for the first time, and later when they sat together on a park bench while Lyons read him the poem.
"In my mind, it was like he read my thoughts," Monti says. "That was me. What came to mind was, 'How in the hell does this guy know all this stuff?' I've had some amazing times in my life, but that was tops."
But while Monti says it was "totally, totally super-amazing" to have a poem written about him, it is The Vet, the poem inspired by the Cenotaph, that is his favourite.
"That's truth right there," Monti says, about that poem. "That should be in a big hardcover book you read in a library. I'd even go back to the library to read a book like that."
Monti adjusts the pair of bags slung across his chest, stares across Churchill Square to where Lyons sits alone on a park bench in the sun.
"There he is," Monti says. "The poet of Churchill Square. He sees it all."
Lyons is trying to turn it around, trying to get back some of what he has lost. He says he hasn't gambled since May, has whittled a two-pack-a-day habit down to seven cigarettes. He's waiting to deal with his charges in court, and is thinking about how to get his $840-a-month government payments increased, just enough that he can get himself a small apartment and maybe get back on his feet.
He wants to make peace with his son, hold his baby granddaughter. He hopes his wife may take him back one day. Maybe. If he can rebuild some of the trust that was lost.
"I don't know if she'll ever take me back," he admits. "But that's her decision. I can only do my part."
He says he will use the same qualities that got him into this situation -- stubbornness, determination -- to get him out.
It's hard work, but there are victories. The Cenotaph has been cleaned, and Lyons wonders if he may have had something to do with that. He chuckles as he remembers a city worker calling him a pain in the butt.
Lyons is just glad it was done. It makes him happy to see the monument clean, with a new wreath.
He planned to attend Thursday's Remembrance Day ceremony, to pay tribute to the battles fought by others as he continues to fight his own.
Lyons says he is tired but will keep "plugging away," going to his Gamblers Anonymous meetings, his support groups, his medical appointments, those sessions with a psychiatrist. "They think I am going to commit suicide," he says.
He might.
He has emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and a hernia the size of a basketball protrudes in a misshapen lump from his stomach. "The biggest the specialist has ever seen in 30-some-odd years," he says, lifting his shirt to expose the massive growth.
It is the spot on his lung and a problem with his colon that worry him most, and he's waiting on the results of a biopsy and a colonoscopy. He is going to the doctor on Dec. 6, his 59th birthday.
"If I have an untreatable disease, say cancer, I will deal with it," he says. "If I decide to end it, I'll end it. That's not crazy. That's pragmatic. That's being a realist."
But Kevan Lyons isn't thinking too much about dying these days. He is thinking about living. About getting by. And about the words in his notebooks, which may one day have the power to take him home.
Carrying his soul in his pocket
Forgotten 'Poet of Churchill Square' knows what it means to remember
Most people passing through Churchill Square on a bright autumn afternoon might not notice Kevan Lyons.
Sitting alone on a park bench, a ball cap pulled down over squinting eyes and a half-smoked cigarette hanging from his lips, he is just one of the many homeless people spending the day on the fringes of the square.
A man with a briefcase walks by without glancing over. A woman talks on a cellphone as she rushes past.
Lyons is almost invisible, but he doesn't mind.
"It's not about me," he says. "It's never been about me."
Lyons wants people to notice the Cenotaph outside City Hall. It bothered him earlier this month to see it dirty and in disrepair, a sign to him that the veterans it represents were being forgotten. Veterans like his father, who spent four years as a PoW in Japan, and all the others.
"It's dirty, it's black, it's covered in bird shit, and nobody cares," Lyons says. "Nobody cares it's there except for one day a year."
Lyons says he talked to city workers and called City Hall several times asking to get the war memorial cleaned up, but for a long time nothing happened.
After staring at the dirty memorial day after day, he turned his feelings of frustration into a poem. It helped.
Lyons, 58, has been living on the streets for four months.
It is a world away from the places he used to call home, some of them quarter-million-dollar houses that are worth even more now. He spent his first weeks on the
street sleeping in a cemetery, more comfortable resting among the dead than going to one of the city's homeless shelters.
"I'm too proud," he says. "I just don't want to go to the shelters. I'm stubborn that way."
Lately, he has been spending his nights in an unheated garage he rents for $400 a month, but he knows he has to find somewhere else to go. Winter is coming, and the garage will soon be too cold.
Lyons says he never wrote a poem in his life until four months ago, until everything fell apart, until his "crash and burn," when he found himself on the streets, homeless, with words inside ready to spill out.
"I found a soul," he says. "Poetry is my soul."
He touches a notebook, his fingers lightly tapping the lines of crooked black printing.
"This keeps me going."
The poems are with him always. He keeps a small notebook inside the breast pocket of his jacket beside two Gamblers Anonymous booklets, and he uses that one for ideas and early drafts. He has a bigger notebook in his bag for revisions, and another for finished poems. Those are the ones he likes, the ones he reads to people. There are 18 in that book, so far.
"Not bad poetry for an old man," he says.
Right now, the poems are nearly all Lyons has. He says poetry is the way he tries to deal with things that have happened in his life, the things that were his fault, and those that weren't.
He pulls out a thin wallet, takes out a worn picture of a little girl. Barbie.
"That's my angel," he says.
His daughter had problems from the time she was born, a malformation of the cervical vertebrae in her neck kept her in and out of hospital, but Lyons thinks more about how Barbie was always happy, how she never complained. He calls her his soulmate.
Her death was sudden. Lyons says he came home one day in 1995 and found her. She was 13 years old.
"I never got over it," he says. "Never outlive your children. Ever."
Some of the problems started there. It wasn't the cause, he says. Just another piece of the puzzle.
After Barbie died, Lyons became restless and bored. He had left a career as a real estate agent for a job as a property manager, and he started spending more and more time playing VLTs. He doesn't do drugs or drink alcohol, so he says he would go to family places, Albert's or Boston Pizza, where he could sit for hours sipping coffee and feeding the machines. He never meant to sit all day, but sometimes it just happened, and through the years it happened more and more. He put $1,000 into those machines more days than he can count, until he had gambled away $200,000 without ever setting foot inside a casino.
Once, he lost $8,000 in a single day. It was never enough.
Lyons faces criminal charges for theft and fraud, money he says he took from a friend to feed his addiction. He says his marriage of more than 30 years broke up because his wife couldn't trust him anymore.
"It's not her fault," he says. "It's my fault."
It's the things other people don't see that inspire Lyons most. He writes poems about people he meets on the street, about suicide, about the small garden at the side of Churchill Square. One poem is about his time sleeping in the cemetery, his nights spent with other people, dead and forgotten.
The Invisible Man poem is about Ken Monti, another homeless man who hangs out at Churchill Square. Monti still remembers the day he met Lyons for the first time, and later when they sat together on a park bench while Lyons read him the poem.
"In my mind, it was like he read my thoughts," Monti says. "That was me. What came to mind was, 'How in the hell does this guy know all this stuff?' I've had some amazing times in my life, but that was tops."
But while Monti says it was "totally, totally super-amazing" to have a poem written about him, it is The Vet, the poem inspired by the Cenotaph, that is his favourite.
"That's truth right there," Monti says, about that poem. "That should be in a big hardcover book you read in a library. I'd even go back to the library to read a book like that."
Monti adjusts the pair of bags slung across his chest, stares across Churchill Square to where Lyons sits alone on a park bench in the sun.
"There he is," Monti says. "The poet of Churchill Square. He sees it all."
Lyons is trying to turn it around, trying to get back some of what he has lost. He says he hasn't gambled since May, has whittled a two-pack-a-day habit down to seven cigarettes. He's waiting to deal with his charges in court, and is thinking about how to get his $840-a-month government payments increased, just enough that he can get himself a small apartment and maybe get back on his feet.
He wants to make peace with his son, hold his baby granddaughter. He hopes his wife may take him back one day. Maybe. If he can rebuild some of the trust that was lost.
"I don't know if she'll ever take me back," he admits. "But that's her decision. I can only do my part."
He says he will use the same qualities that got him into this situation -- stubbornness, determination -- to get him out.
It's hard work, but there are victories. The Cenotaph has been cleaned, and Lyons wonders if he may have had something to do with that. He chuckles as he remembers a city worker calling him a pain in the butt.
Lyons is just glad it was done. It makes him happy to see the monument clean, with a new wreath.
He planned to attend Thursday's Remembrance Day ceremony, to pay tribute to the battles fought by others as he continues to fight his own.
Lyons says he is tired but will keep "plugging away," going to his Gamblers Anonymous meetings, his support groups, his medical appointments, those sessions with a psychiatrist. "They think I am going to commit suicide," he says.
He might.
He has emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and a hernia the size of a basketball protrudes in a misshapen lump from his stomach. "The biggest the specialist has ever seen in 30-some-odd years," he says, lifting his shirt to expose the massive growth.
It is the spot on his lung and a problem with his colon that worry him most, and he's waiting on the results of a biopsy and a colonoscopy. He is going to the doctor on Dec. 6, his 59th birthday.
"If I have an untreatable disease, say cancer, I will deal with it," he says. "If I decide to end it, I'll end it. That's not crazy. That's pragmatic. That's being a realist."
But Kevan Lyons isn't thinking too much about dying these days. He is thinking about living. About getting by. And about the words in his notebooks, which may one day have the power to take him home.
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