for a high school friend, dead at 25 in 1976.

She demanded doomed love
( too much poetry)
and she found it;
born with an ungainly
sense of tragedy,
she was a heat seeking missile
perfectly tracking destruction.

He was a hugger and a hitter,
a cheater and a beater,
charming as a cobra to his prey
who reveled in his cruelty
and dragged her down

until the day she realized,
you can't negotiate with evil,
and tragedy isn't comedy
and darkness is very dark

and slit her wrists and got away.


  ~mce