I wonder what everyone else was feeling
                         when you were rushed to the hospital.

Again.

Eyes rolled,
mouths scoffed,
                      unsurprised.

Like the only place it made sense for you to be was
locked up
                                                  or six feet under.

I managed to stitch together the fragmented sentences
I had heard
and fill the spaces in between
with what I could infer.
Two sole letters
reverberated off the cave walls of my mind:

OD,
                                OD,
               OD.

An anthem I fell asleep to where I dreamed of a bedroom

for remission to make love to your addictions.

Those two letters became five before I could grasp the finality.

D
                          E
             A

                 T


H.

I was shattered.
The pieces of myself,
I’ve retrieved off the floor
and put them together in the puzzle of my life
where I have no place for drugs to fit.

I think about you more often than anyone is willing to believe.
When you took your first sip of alcohol,
                        a mixed drink of
     one part peer pressure
                          and another part curiosity,

        did you know you’d end up drinking your life away?

Driving and drinking don’t go together-
but maybe no one ever told you that.

But soon, it wasn’t enough.

You felt the need to get high to get through the day,
but did you hear your life start to break and our hearts along with it?

You always had a ‘go big or go home’ mentality,
I just wish you hadn’t applied it to drugs.


“Drugs don’t ****” has become the war cry.

I know.

They do so much more than that.
       They rip families apart
       steal honor from fathers,
        children from mothers,
        and life from anyone.

You huff and you puff and soon you become
       the big bad wolf who brings
              the house d
                               o
                               w
                               n

I still hold you in the highest respect
and I can’t make that point clear enough.

You never stopped fighting.


That monkey on your back didn’t live an easy life.

why am I always so afraid?

You've asked me how can I see a future when love, in all
Its numinous beauty, is waning?
I reply, the immortal stars still shine above the veil of clouds.
You say, why are the salmon swimming to their pools of origin
Only to die as they spawn?  Only to die?
I tell you their love is unconditional, like mine.
You ask me did the giant sequoia know it was shelter for the burning grasses
When they walked from the seas?  I reply yes they knew.
You question me about the lofty snow cranes that fly over the Himalayas
And I reply by describing
How the priestly flocks, chanting on their mission, honk—
Announcing the mantle steps to the heavens.
You inquire about the elephantine manatees gracing the shallow banks
And wonder if the sea mermaids remember their lives beyond the latitudes
Of capricorn and cancer?
Or you’ve discovered in the wind a new reasoning as to why
The talons of the paired eagles lock in midair as they court?
You want to understand the nimbus garden, ocean slate, of lake Titicaca
Where resides the Andean sea horse gliding above the clouds?
The whales that circle dance in unison collecting krill?
The noetic display of the birds of paradise, the songs of nameless creatures
Playing in the wilderness like a forgotten melody only lovers lips remember?

I want to tell you that true love knows this, that life in its
Prismatic shimmer is all the myriad colours of infinite existence wrapped
In time to the sublime structure of white and bones.  I must tell you
That the flower is mighty in its opening, the humming bird is a sorcerer
Who needles ambrosia with vortex wings weaving his way to the Gods.

But I am nothing beside your disbelief which has arrived, before
I can even imagine the sweet awakening, like doom, my shell is the iridescent
Hollow of the one eyed Abalone, discarded in the deep fathoms
Of the ocean pressures.

I swim the tides as you do, investigating
The endless tendril seas,
And in my chest, during the night, I woke up empty,
The only thing treasured, a golden face
Trapped inside my dreams.

                                                        ­­          
                                                             ­­                       — after Neruda