you carried me home,
again,
I am inebriated on the cheapest liqueur,
you've done this before,
you've held me,
and if we had to walk you made sure,
you walked on the outside
you know me,
and my tendency to conduct
traffic in the middle of the street,

if we drove,
you,
made patterns on my back,
smoothing out my dress,
or collecting all that I have taken off,
like a jaded version of Hansel and Gretel,
you are always picking up the pieces of the crumbs i dropped,
you forever in the friend zone,
and I am continually putting on and taking off,
creating intricate dances for strangers,

and you catch me when I fall,
I am forever falling,
wandering the woods looking for danger,
or maybe just another way out,
I speak to witches,
you pray to Jesus,
I used to call him mine.
and you hold my hand,
when I began another round,
of self infliction,
another bout of self destruction,
you stay my sword,
swords that nick my wrists,
that have found home in obscure location
but can be found in any provocation.

you stay my hands,
allowing me to yell and scream,
allowing me my anger,
you know it's just misplaced,
and I am just struggling to deal,

I recreate wounds that never showed up,
play house with the demons,
as they remind me I have been beaten,
with the words of an abuser,
I felt the tainted touch of emotional vice.

but you follow me,
lovingly,
consistently,
like a chain wrapped rigid around your heart,
and I feel in foggy delay,
so intoxicated with the ghosts of things that fester,
you are the only one who keeps me safe.

And I have loved you, even when it seemed like I didn't notice,
I know you hold my hair when porcelain tattoos my skin
and I am making love to tiles on the floor.

and with any and all parts of me that are good,
they have lived and survived because of you,
living in the wasteland you have become my sun.

your grace and love carry me,
though I am not as strong yet to live for them,

you have shown unmeasurable kindness,
to me,
and my knight to beat back my darkness,
I may not say it,
I should just say it,

*I love you.Forever and always.

They say, that the sun sets best in Arizona.
The only reason I believed them
was because the first time we met
you leaned in close, crooked smile and all
pointed to the horizon ablaze
and whispered

"I painted that for you."

I've downloaded it's image on my retinas,
so even in the pangs of night
I know it's warmth.

Through my search, I have noted:

That everything is more beautiful when it burns.

That the sparks of a first kiss will be forever envious
of the pulsating rays of the sun.
And that love isn't beautiful until it is set on fire.
You taught me that.

We spent our time getting lost in each others horizons.
Staying up late, chain smoking and
getting drunk on Walt Whitman
until morning dripped from the skyline.

And like the rainbow that serves as
a reminder of God's mercy,
the sunset is a reminder of yours.

*You just couldn't let me burn any longer.

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.

I hit you from seven hundred angles
Inhaling your vapor
You stink
I never thought someone like you could exist
I think at light speed
How to take your oxygen
Make your existence reduce
Like a crack pipe abduction
Can I allow your death
Which your nastiness has denied
I wish your eyes to bleed
When you see my glory
Hold my dreams to your face
Fill your blood with its doses
Then watch it stop your heart
See my conscience in the sky
Feel my word of mouth
Stab you in the eye
Rip your lungs out
As you try to inhale
The fragments of my intellect
I am the young jedi
Looking to devour your force
Squeeze your source of life
It is quit awkward looking at my portrait
Smiling like mona lisa
Only I know what I want to do with you
I will fill your ears with poison words
So it can o straight to your brain
Feeling like I am hitting you with stone
There will be no copies made of you
As my words impede
Your reproduction
My thought will remain in your head
As you ******* to my ecstasy
Then you will love me

Manhattan by line,
by subway track purr,
by foot in a midwinter
fresh, gale force air.

The dying battery in
Times Square's wristwatch,
halts hands in mid air,
each hailing the second taxi
that comes to them
every next minute;
definitely in the next ten.

Buried benches in thigh high
snow look lost, with
only their branching tops
on display for the tourist's show,
tramping through
this January snow.

Double-back, back
past the Chipotle store,
where diners stand and eat,
stand and greet,
stand with napkins to appear neat,
stand near the radiator to warm their feet,
stand-in-the-corner-and-text-your-wife-saying-you'll-be-hom­e-late-because-this-meaty-wrap-is-pleasurable-to-eat.

He was with another woman, kissing her cheek.

Manhattan is a horizon of horizontal lines,
drawn by pencil lead, led up a page
to create this fascinating portrait
that a point-and-click-camera
cannot comprehend,
let alone negotiate.

We can go unnoticed there, like
most others in this gale force air,
but billboard boys-
the ones that braid ****** building hair,
window panes
and balcony balustrade-
are the famous ones
of Broadway, with nothing more
than their commercial stare.

A leer leapt across his face,
it was not a surf smirk
that rolls up from coral cheeks,
but a snide smile that
surprised everyone there.

Coffee shop stopped and halted,
for this man fell to his knees
and asked to wed,
a girlfriend of small brunette proportions,
whom sat next to him
basking in good fortune.

Golden orbit
of metal bound
and knit,
graced her finger, slipped
down the knuckle,
fused to the skin
as every buckle ever worn.

For these two would make it,
sworn to mourn when the other fell.