Gambling Addiction: Poker, VLT, Slot Machines, Pokies Addiction

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Kevan Lyons: Poet of Churchill Square
Mr. Lyons speaks about his 20 years of gambling addiction. "You have to deal with your issues."

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.

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/story.html?id=307e015a-c107-4b86-956c-...

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• compulsive
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• gambling
• addiction
• ga
• gamblers
• anonymous
• pokies
• vlts
• slot
• machines
• overcome
• treatment

[cantovi3tboy]

take the pokies out of our pubs please it ruin people lives

[iloveadigi]

What a wonderful video. Having worked very closely with author Gisele Jubinville who wrote the book Dismissed...how one woman's intuition ended her addiction and exposed a government coverup, she found that there are two aspects to a gambling addiction (at least in the case of VLTs). And after learning the whole story, she no longer has the urge to play Search her name and watch all her videos to find out more.