At nineteen years old
I had to ask my coworker
What it meant to have someone
Stand at your wedding.
I have seen more overdoses,
More suicides,
More accidental shootings
Than I have seen lives created;
Lives joined.
I do not know what it means
To stand at someone's wedding
But I do know what it means to be a pallbearer
Because I remember the tears
In my father's eyes
When he laid his father to rest
Due to medicinal negligence.
I do not know
What exactly happens at a wedding
But I can tell you
What happens
When they find your best friend since kindergarten
Cold
In a hotel room miles away
With a needle in her arm,
I can tell you that we all hugged her mother
And smoked cigarettes
And wished that we could be spelling it
Heroine instead of
******
But the world doesn't work that way
And sometimes,
Most of the time,
When people ask you if you want some coke
They do not mean the soft drink
But sometimes the people I love
Accept it any way.

Only God watched me as I watched
you, running your fingers through
your hair to tame it as the wind
tried to taste it--a delicious moment
made for swallowing to keep
inside me because
these seconds of savoring you
seem a sweet and secret sin.

ELSIE FLIMMERWON, you got a job now with a jazz outfit in vaudeville.
  
The houses go wild when you finish the act shimmying a fast shimmy to The Livery Stable Blues.
  
It is long ago, Elsie Flimmerwon, I saw your mother over a washtub in a grape arbor when your father came with the locomotor ataxia shuffle.
  
It is long ago, Elsie, and now they spell your name with an electric sign.
  
Then you were a little thing in checked gingham and your mother wiped your nose and said: You little fool, keep off the streets.
  
Now you are a big girl at last and streetfuls of people read your name and a line of people shaped like a letter S stand at the box office hoping to see you shimmy.

ill
    at
        the
             thought
of
   her
        head
                 in
                     the
                          spot
where
           mine
                    ought
                               to
                                   be
but
      is
         not
                 -

I am the one who cuts the strings and,
Then ties them back together.

I am the one engulfed by tears and,
longs for a forever.

I could never,
blame you.

For this knot containing,
tangles.

Giving up on me is the only answer,
To those questions never asked.

You tried (once or twice) I do remember,
I'm the one who remains masked.

And,
I could never,
blame you.

For the things that go,
unseen.

I expexted you to be a little more like
me.

I expected you to look inside and,
delve deep into the sea.

But you did not.

*For that I cannot blame you