I'm watching my friends follow the paths of their brothers
Chain smoking pill poppers looking for love from their mothers
But instead they find it in the
Prize from their dealer
Until everything around them is nothing but a third-wheeler
And all genuine emotion is replaced with this hunger
It's days like these when I wish we were all still younger
Before I ever even considered I might watch my friends become users
When getting high was just smoking, not meeting up with random prescription drug abusers
Im watching the best people I know
use this drug as their foundation
And when it all crumbles, I hope that they have an inner realization
That they were once people others looked up to and respected,
But now they've become shadows of everything they've injected.

Light creeps in through fogged glass
To a room full of smoking enthusiasts
Dinner is served on a paper plate
In a failed attempt to rehabilitate
Red wine stains your mothers blouse
Inconsequential in this small house
Dust settles into carpets worn by time
Like the family, never to  leave Anaheim

I am naught but a twig
In the mouth of a pit bull
Clenched between wet jowls
Doom, impending.
I tried it my way,
took my own chances
Bloodied my fingers
and my lungs.
Smoked and drank
more then I ate
and I ate a lot.
Now I drink from a different bottle
This one filled with
soothing emptiness,
In peach-colored capsules.

I sit in the same chair, everyday
picking at my toe nails,
smoking cigarettes and ****
keeping an eye on the trees
and the vines creeping up my fence.
I watch the rain slide down the window,
to settle in the sweet mud.
I step outside, feel the wetness between my toes
and know that these simple impressions
are lasting, are forever.

his road goes for miles and miles
with no signs and no lights
its too dark to know
if hes been here before.
he's made better moves.
even with the slowing of his feet
his thoughts are immediate.
he packs up the feelings
that hes brought
not one excuse to prove
and continues on his road
beginning his ascent
on a road with no exits

Lofty aspirations
built on crumbling foundations
caused by faulty medications
filled with combinations
of complications
and expectations
from other generations
and fluctuations
of explanations
ignoring the implications
and frustrations
hallucinations and
interpretations
and the misrepresentations
of the ramifications
of your demonstrations


just to feel the sensations
the vibrations
of knowing you have no limitations
life is vacations
mixed with contemplations
of temptations
and on occasion
imagination

I've tried killing my leeches
the things that **** me speechless
but I can't throw that first stone
because through my mind they comb

Images of my father, when he left us
in his ****** attempt to repossess
a piece of his youth
to calm the anger the pills couldn't soothe
from his failed attempts at parenting
(a trait I hope I'm not inheriting)

I don't blame him, one hundred percent;
my mother had an iron facade of content
for years, secretly crying from the torment
suffering with the life that she never dreamt,
she started her spiral, her descent,
but I never knew to what extent
until the night he breached her trust
with fraudulent intent

It's a bridge that has burned
which every mistake he's confirmed
brought down the supports
but set me onto the right course
To be someone different
compassionate, considerate
and most of all deliberate.