i am cold without your eyes in my sockets. do you still look? i still look. do you still see? i don't.

i don't.

I want to use smaller and simpler  
Words, until my poems are those of
Infants drawing stick figures
On gallery walls.

Haikus like commas;  
Periods of teeniest tiniest
Truths.

I name this
School of
Poetry
Crayon.

She lights another one, she'd rather
Smoke than run.
It used to be for fun,  
Now it's become more a
Reaction than behaviour.
We all turn to our saviour.

He'll pour himself one more
Unlike before when he was
Not a drunk for sure.
He drinks himself onto the floor, a
Toast to friends he lost to
War, to wishing he was
Just as dead and gone as
They were.  
We all turn to our saviour.

She doesn't even try, with all the lies
She tells the guys.
They grow in size until it's
No surprise she lies herself to
Self-despise.
There's truth behind her eyes, but
Deep inside and in disguise.
Now it's too late
To tell the truth,
She's only sickened by its flavour.
We all turn to our saviour.

I try to use my voice and speak
Out loud, but sound so weak I
Close my mouth. I sneak a line in
Inbetween; as thin as paper.
Being heard instead of read means
I'll be quiet when I'm dead.

I pick the pen instead, again when
Stating something sort of major.
We all turn to our saviour.

I cannot recall the moment
that sanity became a working goal.

Drugs are expensive,
sobriety; even more so.
Somewhere between all of this
I will have to learn to live.

The homeless are pushed out of town,
asleep beneath the railway bridge
that sends rain through rivets
like bullets.

I keep punching the clock
as it throttles Eros with slow hands.

“Sometimes just a smile is enough”
reads a cardboard placard.
But I have not cracked a smile
since I started popping these pills.