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.

Enter the eyes of majority;

Rigid words sunk into his soft-spoken skin;
Pale faces like dominoes, fresh and ready to drop.
Mother Nature's clothing hung from identical bait.
Peace-keepers and their machinery, step, step, hop.
Honor gained at morality's cost;
Foreign lands to the eyes of a hawk leaves no pause
Their claws evacuate a population of concrete heart.
No mercy or plea can stop them from fighting for their cause.
Blind bangs targeted at their prayers and hopes
Bouncing, or breaking through a bull's eyed wall.
Pupils diluted as a distant, scorching Sun
Returning depression; pictures flung on a golden painted hall.

Exit the eyes of majority, enter the tongue of grievance

We fall
We feel pain
A loss of will and heart
We think that it is over
When light turns to dark
This is life

But we must strive, survive, and fight
from dusk unto dawn
For even if it ends for us
For others it goes on