damn ma, you musta been through some shit

new as of 15 minutes ago:

one time you found a rosary in the garden,

remember when it was cracked down the middle,

split like skulls of aqua rock,

i chucked it across the walk way

and you were humming, jerry come back to me

and maybe the decomposing of your brain

sparked brush fires and fist fights

and you buried it under rose bushes

and marked each gravestone with

rest in pieces

of puzzling clarity,

you’d rather spit up those 12 steps,

because they couldn’t force feed you sobriety

and you kept dreaming

and I kept hoping you’d see ghosts surface

from the moon’s shadows

and it hurt me to tell you that i never knew the answers 

but i didn’t deserve the anger

and i couldn’t watch my mother die

and i don’t even wonder why

she didn’t want me to know

that the blood flowing out her nose

was the same blood flowing out my wrists

and it mixed red like the poster paint

you can still find at the drug store.

 

and the drug store

has become a lot more

than mint ice cream cones

or developing pictures

from that one time

or grabbing a bottle of coke

to mix with

your whiskey dick

and i’m so helpless

picking up your prescriptions

to store in your medicine cabinet

so i’m hosting a pity party

for the refugees of the families

of addicts

 

and someone sold their sole prints

to the devil’s apprentice

and he’s making stone shoes for the reckless

and both my mother and my best friend have brown eyes

and they leave trails of lavender

behind ballet feet

and i’m kneeling over the caskets of what once was

and my mother,

wanted to be a nun,

a composition of god in a black habit

and my best friend,

just wanted to be a junkie

and that’s a composition of everything

in the world mixed with our bad habits

and i’m fronting you verses to work with

hoping you’ll pay back the debt

of prescriptions and robberies

watching my fingers shrivel and become skeleton

keys to unlock the psychology of that shit city.

and you say i don’t know a lot about addicts

but i know enough about my mother and my best friend

to stand up and hide all the razor blades in our house

and i know enough about addicts to try and not be one

and i’ll stroke your ego ‘til the angels come

and they’re coming

yeah they’re coming

you can hear their wings

and it sounds like resurrection.