The Leftovers  or   (The Ones Who Survive)

Recipe: ****** *** Pie
The dope, the spoon,
In gutter water
Why did he die, not she

When does it end
Those who survive
Left out to cool
With no friend

Fiends and friends of addicts
Mystify us,  who do not understand
What makes them keep shooting
Into veins of foreign land

They join by ignorance or associate
A friendship they say more strong
Then that of a parent or a childs love
This couldn't be more wrong

The twine of codependency
Makes fools of us all
When one of them dies
Pleading for answers while wishing the other would fall

These are the Leftovers, the suffering addict
With their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends
Who may have saved and tried before
Their pain and shame more severe if you pretend
You are not an ingredient
No less a fiend if sober
If you don't show up
To soothe the pain of being a leftover

Recipe: ****** *** Pie
The dope, the spoon,
In gutter water
Replaced by methadone

When does it end
Those who survive
Left out to cool
With no friend

Nothing is familiar
I have no place
A stone in a field of grass
the wind bends the grass
the stone looks around
nothing is familiar only the ground

Nothing is familiar
Where did I go
what is to be done
Lost in the avenues and avenues of my  Mind
There is no strength to pick up the stone and throw it away
It would just be in another field of grass
Estranged

Nothing is familiar
not even who I am
unknown
The painted landscape has no shape, where should I put the tree
no familiarity
Scanning the clothes on the rack
I used to know they were me
I am no one now
Nothing is familiar in this estrangement

Start with self.
The others can wait.

Thoughts are just passing clouds for which to meditate.
Observe the world as the observer, not the taker or receiver.

Judges are for benches. Do not sit alone.
   Stand and walk into the songs of birds.
   Free within your self called home.

The Illness

You spend exponentially
All services of every cell in your body
For years
To keep an ill one alive

Possible prolonged moments of happiness and hope
trickle in
Between the hospitalizations

Your spending is what you find out
He doesn’t trust.

What one finds out
Is ones unprepared-ness
My son wants to claim his life
For himself, to which could be his end or not.

Like the breaking egg, beak first
Or sunlight cracking through trees
Where light comes out and gives birth
With uneven decisions
Will I live?
And what IS living with a chronic diease like?

What he believes is not that he doesn’t trust you,
He just wants to trust himself.
What other choice in the insanity defense is there
That would be as human, then giving freedom of choice to him.

Everywhere you go
Every where you are promised
Every where you land
Is not for a slab of steel
But are places you imagined to be
Only in your mind

You are where you want to go
You are where you lead
You are all the broken plans
Intended to lift you high above the land
You are air, as light as your intentions
As strong a wind, as your heart can stand

For there you are
Three times over
Where you must be
As you wait on this drifting sand
There may be another path
Just wait long enough
To take a stand

Helping a child with a mental illness and co-occurring disorder such as substance abuse disorder. Our little diamonds who grow up with a broken mind.

Diamonds are in the rough. How long does it take to mine a diamond?

If you as a parent do not have any tools, you will have bloodied hands and feet  and never will you get to where your child can shine without the addictive source.

Diamonds are found in many ways, but to communicate with the diamond, the ore around it is crushed and milled.

Diamonds repel water, but are drawn to grease.

Expect to get down and ***** when helping your addict, but DO NOT, go into the pit. You will be of no help once you are in.

I will stay for today

Tomorrow has me
Already

I know not where I go, hence

I hope for splendor

And the spark off a

sparrows wing.