For Lisa

February 9th 2018

  What did you see in those houses?

  Those desperate pretenders clinging to some half overheard bar tale of suburbia while all around the seeds of hip-hop kleos bloom as lotuses in the puddles that filled our plungers when nobody had 50¢ for bodega water

  Did the silhouette of a little girl twirl about your psyche the way we we spun our crack stems at the tail end of a hit, not to make sure the last of the oil ran down into the blackened chore but for the simple joy of motion?

  I’m sorry

  I’m sorry that when you insisted we pull over and beg God for the cessation of the awful torment, I only half echoed your desperate pleas while wholly bent on how much time your diversion put between me and my elastic-wrapped divinity

  I’m sorry that when I heard about your death, I felt nothing save the mild satisfaction of having one more friend’s name to throw upon an altar already sodden with the blood of all I cared about

  I’m sorry that the God you cried out to chose for his grace the one who joyfully hurled relapse statistics and barely understood French nihilism at every glimmer of sacred truth that cut through our endless fog, while the maggots devour your heroin soaked veins


Originally published at Anti-Heroin Chic

© 2022 Pat Jenkinson