It's been one of those days
Where I hope that you still stalk what I've written
So you may potentially see
That I'm starving for salvation.

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.

I wish I could tell you
That I have fallen in love
With warmth seeping from my pores and pain
Departing from my body,
But I fell in love
With thumbs pressed into my eye sockets
And a noose around my neck.

I wish I could say these things
Without implying that I fell in love
With an obligation
But there are only so many defensive words
When your walls have fallen so far.

I brought you my still beating heart
In a bismol pink bedpan,
Your hands lifting from the gurney
Awaiting salvation through my touch.
In my visions I am seventeen.
I am seeing you for the first time at my work
And you make me laugh.
You reiterate the scarring in your soul and down your back
And I ask, rudely, if I may see some time.
You say sure,
But your face wishes that I had never asked.
In my wonders
I am eighteen and telling a group of people my age at a party
Why I am sober,
Because my body is weak
And I am not tempted.
Thoughts of you and my future swirl in my mind
But they do not connect.
I will try in vain for another year
Before I realize that maybe I need to sober up from you.
In my recent memory,
I'm sitting on the side of your bed
Hoping that you do not die.
But I'm half naked,
Underwear and undershirt the only things I have on
And your skin is too hot
And your voice sounds coked over
And your breathing is not a slow hum
But a ravenous wheeze
And I'm scared
And my breathing becomes torn.
I'm nineteen again
But now I am saying goodbye
Though you are still living
And a week earlier I had pledged myself to you forever.
You cry to me that you were saving for a ring
And I had hoped to hear that
But now that you've said it,
I can feel my stomach toss
Into the bedpan
Which houses my heart
In your hands,
I've taken my place among the dreadfully unbalanced
And the perpetually sad.
I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake
That is too late in the making to be remedied.

I will spend the rest of my days
Praying that the decision to ruin us
Was the right one.

I wrote poems about
How lonely I felt in this goose flesh cardigan
And you brought me bullets with recliners,
Our house full of mistrust
And anguish.

It was with a bottle we began
And with a bottle we will end.

You used to make me nervous
And I liked that.

Now you make me nervous
And I want to die.