Spliced to Vices: A Poem About Addiction, Prostitution, Lost Potential, and Working-Class Britain
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Spliced to Vices is a raw and unflinching poem exploring the devastating impact of drug addiction, prostitution, childhood trauma, social exclusion, and lost potential in working-class communities. Through fragmented imagery, recurring refrains, and autobiographical reflections, the poem follows the decline of a childhood friend whose intelligence, humour, and promise gradually become consumed by crack cocaine addiction and life on society’s margins.
Set against the backdrop of British housing estates, religious division, poverty, and fractured family life, the poem contrasts the innocence of primary school friendships with the harsh realities of adolescence and adulthood. The repeated phrase “spliced to vices” serves as both a lament and an indictment, illustrating how vulnerable young people can become trapped within cycles of addiction, exploitation, and despair that persist for decades.
At its heart, the poem is an elegy for unrealised futures. It remembers a bright, quirky schoolgirl whose individuality once inspired optimism, while reflecting on the wider social conditions that draw countless others into the underworld of drugs, prostitution, and survival. Combining social commentary with personal memory, Spliced to Vices confronts uncomfortable truths about deprivation, abandonment, and the hidden suffering that exists within towns and city centres across Britain.
For readers interested in contemporary social issues, addiction recovery, working-class poetry, urban deprivation, and narratives of lost childhood innocence, Spliced to Vices offers a powerful meditation on the human cost of vice and the enduring hope that redemption may still be possible.
Spliced to Vices
Spliced to vices—
Cut in slices,
submerged—subsurface—
twitches, no fixes.
Capitulated—
crack cocaine conceded,
lungs seeded,
mind bleeded.
Schoolyard—scholarly? clever.
Primary days slammed on forever.
Mate—“the States”
tongue flips, accent slates
Americanisms dripping, heavy, weight.
End-of-term blaze,
Black Barbies standin’ in a haze.
Two-storey maisonette,
net curtains ripped—silhouettes pressed,
after tea, we peek through stress—
opposite he would cross-dress, bold,
heels like weapons, glitter on cold,
eyes wide, jaw tight,
spectacle fuelled, eccentric flight.
Spliced to vices—
precise devices,
subsurface—crack slices,
spiral repeats, life entices.
Pen sharp, pen bleeding,
grammar school dreams—never cheating,
entrance exam—lined up,
necktie strangled, girls high, corrupt.
Expelled? You rebelled—
burned the script, hell-swelled.
Five times a week,
pews creak,
prayers weak,
truth a leak.
Home—bare.
Lord’s Prayer—echoed, hung in stale air.
Birthdays ghosted,
presents drifted,
Christmas stripped—
no gift, just rifted.
Five times a week—
friend drove to service,
doors slammed, metal chorus.
Estate fences, our front gate,
perched like hawks,
their church in state,
we watched, outside, denied,
edges sharp, nowhere to hide.
Spliced to vices—
submerged, subsurface,
crack cocaine conceded,
fingers trace the surface.
Fifteen—left home,
mother shields,
friend expendable,
life obscene,
The fix is the scene.
Hope—skipping rope,
frayed, snagged in debris,
rebuilt quilt, blood-stitches,
Joho—not Saturn’s crow,
orbit broken, don’t go slow.
Still—
Spliced to vices—
life shredded, spliced,
breath rasps in alley vices,
fractured, raw, price.
Alison Little
Alongside this poem
Books that explore addiction and survival in working-class Britain
Punk: A Tale of Abuse, Addiction and Survival
Addiction and Survival
Gary Morgan
Notes from the Poverty Line
Cash Carraway
A Transcontextual and Autoethnographic Becoming
Weston Robins
My Journey Through Prostitution
Rachel Moran
Turn your ideas into verse with the Poetry Writing course from Reed Courses.
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