you sold your computer without backing up the hard disk
losing a novel in progree
you set fire to the wall in your room by nodding out
with a candle lit
those last days you tried to convince me that you had it under
control, you were only shooting a little bit, and
the next hospital trip you'd clean up for good
i found your wasted naked body in a filthy room after
you didn't come to the phone for three days
the coroner asked if you had cancer. i said "no, he just
stopped eating."
you spent your life chasing a moment without pain
with: steaks and ben & jerry's
12 step meetings and bottles of snapple
with vicodin and jack water back
with dreams as big as africa
as you lay alone in your room, 300 of insolent child
withL three herniated disks
hemorrhoids that bled so much you actually
needed a transfusion
peripheral neuropathy, sciatica,
pounding headaches no pill could cure
a painfully twisted wrist broken in a manic blackout
and days where you were working for God and he wanted
you to take a fifty-dollar cab ride to some burnt-out
east oakland neighborhood where the pharmacy was
crooked
and days where getting out of bed was like taking the last
four steps to the guillotine
and a scar where a pharmacist shot you
a scar where a crack pipe burned you
a scar buried so deep it was a secret even to yourself
yet somehow you believed in a sip from the holy grail
a best-selling novel that would buy you a house full of
himalayan cats with a yard dotted with flowers or
one of your poems sparking a revolution of beautiful
misfits in black or
the kind of fame where you read your work in electrified
stadiums with a famous rockband as the opening act
and that hopeless hope made you
beautiful as aphrodite in a giant seashell
loveable as a basket of kttens
intense as a jeweller inspecting a diamond that's
going to make him rich
in the end it wasn't the wine that went to your head
maura o'conner
