Degredation

It's a cold September rain
that crashes to the ground
in fallen haste, spear-heading
itself in the process

You sit, hands worrying
themselves to death in the
ICU, 3rd floor, hotel for the
emptiest forms of humanity
possible,

I'm afraid that if you worry
your beautiful hands any more
that they will be next on the gurney
sliding down the highway to hell,

I agreed to sit here with you, when
you called me, middle of the night, 3am,
her Great Escape finally successful

I awoke to the sound of your initially
inexplicable sobs, "she's gone, gone, gone..."

In the darkness we drove, bats out
of hell, rushing to get to her - but what for?
So that you could caress her broken corpse
just once more? Run your fingertips over the
black, twisted stitches that held together, the
gaping wounds that looked like tiny mouths,
screaming a thousand words she could not say?

Now we sit, waiting on her family
as you mumble about a couple
hundred blue and yellow capsules she
decided would make for a perfect dinner,
followed, of course, by vodka,

always vodka with her...

I hear you say something about her
delicate, ink-stained wrists, split wide,
and how sad, you thought, the way the
pictures drawn into her skin would no
longer be even - the way they were before

I can't focus, for the life of me, I can't -
for that, I eternally apologize, however,
I'm too lost in the beauty of your devastated
eyes, that hide a menagerie of thoughts both
depraved and brilliant

They say there is a fine line between genius and insanity
and you, my friend, have been seamlessly travelling
back and forth on that line for years now it seems

Especially with her...

I watch rain slide down the window panes
of your ivory face, eyes red-rimmed and filled
with the tiniest of spiderwebs - also a deep crimson - the
way I'm sure her bathroom must have appeared to
the inexperienced EMT - who took one look at her
fleshy, meat wrists that sprayed the walls in the gore of her pain
and suffering, and promptly vomited all over the floor...

as if she had not made enough of a mess, already...

You shake your head virulently and in disbelief,
"whowhatwhenwherewhywhywhy??" and in the process
your salty grief covers the lapel of my jacket

'Why can't you just let her go', I wonder absent-mindedly
to myself, aware that for people such as herself, peace would
never be found in the places that she had the predisposed tendency to
look...
In the crack den's, in the balled up fists of
some new abusive man,
and in the dark recesses of her mind,
where she wandered, happily lost
for eternity

"I guess," you finally say, "that she found her peace at last."

'Yes,' I think to myself, 'in a sea of vodka and pills and blood, cooked in the bathtub like her own brand of moon shine..."