Remember

Projecting in my mind
An Instant
Etched in memory forever
Plucked from the obscurity
Of high-school dinners
And cold
winter mornings
When the snow was fresh
And when the air was
ripe with dew- I find myself caught
Within a web
Of stony tombstone rock.


To everyone else a statistic
-To me
My Flesh
My Blood-
Ensnared in the realm
Of delirium, neglect
And drunkenness.

Sanity may have slid
through the grasp of the protector
Or was
the soothing bitterness
Of the devil
too enticing to ignore?
Stronger than love
Temptation must be

A death bed
A luxury
She was not at liberty
To have- Merely
A downtown cradle
Criss-crossed with
Broken bottles
entwined with syringes
woven around
discarded cigarettes

As she drew her final breath
Amongst the stench of ethanol
She drifted out of this world
Never to awake again.

Buried in a pothole
Rife with disease
And the rain
Of days gone by.
'Twas
no more than
Four feet deep


Every foot, a year.