This poem is anotha poem inspired by GIA. Also inspired by the bleak statistics that 1 out of 38 addicts get and stay clean. one day at a time, one word at a time...ima prove all of them WRONG. hope u all enjoy the poem as much as i enjoyed writing it...
For Gia And All The Other 37
She wanted to get the hell out of there. I know those blank
walls where the death sentence is written and it is totally
blank. It is purgatory and there is nothing to read. She dreams
of being five years old again at the bottom of the stairs
before her hair ever got cut; she wanted to be home like
in that picture, long braids at the bottom of the stairs. I too had
that picture in my head, a postcard, a home to hang up
on your cell wall. In reality though every junky’s homeless,
their best shot at a home is the mansions in the air with
the infinite rooms. Home as faraway and unbreathable as
the air that is everywhere. They tried to wean her from
the tube, to get her onto the real air. After this they knew she wasn’t
going back home, and she wasn’t gonna breathe again. I was on
that train too, ten years in fact. Her unwillingness to breathe the real
air was my unwillingness. I would not breathe the air,
I was obstinate, I breathed through the tube, the crack pipe, the joint,
the syringe anything I could find to not have to breathe like the others, to not have to be
like the others. When I saw others’ breathing I choked on vomit and
sucked in some more drugs. Her hair had been tragically cut short. It
fell on the floor. For her heroin, or whoever you want to call it, we all know who it
is, is king of everything. You could tell by the way she clung to
the empty crown and even put it on her shorn head and smiled, she was not
fit to bring home or to breathe. Her mother is there, always there, but still
it’s not home, it still does not help her breathe on her own. The mother
of the addict has her arms forever open wide. But she cannot
hold you, she is a paper doll the addict daughter cut out to
play with, to pretend real love with, the mother doll smiles love but
the paper remembers the cut. Addiction puts in your hand a tube
instead of a pen, and you put it in your mouth and breathe and then
life is breathable. I refused the air of you and you and you. I was too
good, I was too bad to breathe with you; I oscillated. I was nowhere.
I was nothing. And I thought that was better than being me. For ten years
I breathed anesthesia like air. They could not pry
the syringe from my fist as I went in to save it from
the burning building. I came out of flames swinging with my one
sharp edge. I tried to breathe in suicide. I thought I’d get a backwards ambulance
ride home. Really stupid; really all I was ever doing was finding new creative ways
to get myself locked up in the same old jails institutions and death.
They are all different rooms in hell, all different deaths with
the same blank walls. And you wake up dead and it’s up to you to imagine life
after this. The drugs run out and you wake up from death.
The drugs run out and everything runs out, and in that desperation you run
out, even naked you run out even bleeding as a fresh wound, you run
out into the bright fall, winter, spring, summer everyday air.
Ocean, mountain, desert everywhere air. It is breathtaking to breathe
in and then do it again. The clear air that is everyones and is good like
a diamond is forever. Whether you like it or not, it’s good,
it’s forever. Whether I like it or not, I am clean many moons,
many suns- many diamonds. Life is many moons, many suns, a chain
of diamonds. Life is not what I thought when I was hanging around
complaining about my childhood, making a home for myself in
a noose. All I know for sure it that there IS life after drugs. I decide to find
out what IS, is. I decide to be the one out of
38, the one for whom the 37 had to die so one could live. You were one
of them and so were many others I have seen. This concept is as far out
as alien life, as infinite mansions in the air, but I have seen the alternative so
I’m willing as the sun is willing to boldly go and discover
everything. Addiction has given me nothing to lose and a mind so broken
open it’s a parachute. Addiction takes everything and then it takes
your life and hooks it up to a life support system, and you believe more in
the life support system than in life. You cannot entertain life beyond
this system. Addiction is built on the floors of jail cells, the beds of
hospitals, the dirt of graves, the backs of children. They are mere children
stolen from home, their hair is cut short and then their lives cut
simply like hair. Two braids lopped off, a life unable now to crawl up the stairs.
Addiction makes a wall, white blank wall with a little hole in it
a hole to the real world. Addiction says it’s easier with
a wall in-between. There is always a wall and a little hole
waiting for the addict. A little hole, a little tube with a little air, a little
syringe with a little glint of light, just a little, just enough and
not too much, like one of those dog leashes that expands a little
more so you can sniff freedom but never all the way, never
free. So I knew I had to go all the way. In the dead of
night I got the hell out. I pulled out my own IV’s. I threw up
the tube, the pipe, the joint, the syringe. I trashed the whole system. I punched
the machine’s lights out. I had to go all out “against medical advice.” I had to get
labelled crazy then tear down the walls crazily. I made the little hole a big
hole and then I stepped through. I had to listen to them
say: she will never go home, she will never breathe again. I had to hear
this everyday for ten years. Hear it and know it and feel it and
be it and breathe it and then I had to turn and
go do it anyway...
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