Scullery Maid

I scrabble at the outskirts of your life,
Your scullery maid of sorts,
I wash your clothes and dishes, feed you
and provide you companionship when
you ring your tiny bell,
You are the sick old woman in the West Wing
of the mansion,
and I am continuously scraping up the remains of
your humanity,
Your mess and your miserable life,
I used to try valiantly to be part of your world,
To be a piece of your happiness,
But you shove a dustpan in my hand and
force me to sweep myself from the corners
of your crumbling life,
As if I don't exist,
As if I never really were here at all,
I suppose this is your way of coping with life,
At least - that's what your pitiful excuse for a therapist
would have said...but what did she ever know...

Ravings

3:20 am in the largest cities in the world,
Who sleeps in them, I always wonder,
Who sleeps at this hour that exhales, finally,
the somber breath of the day prior in a thick, hot
expulsion,
Not I,
Not I or any of the other vagabond-artist-mentally-ill type
loons who spend their time circling and cycling in and out
of bars and psychiatric wards where we keep one hand open for a
glass of Jack Daniels and the other for a new medication from
Jesus Christ M.D.
We swallow our pills and shoot up our
veins and babble to our shrinks and don't sleep, forget
to eat, eat too much, hate our fathers, ignore our mothers when they
call Sunday afternoons at 4pm, turn slowly into the broken skulls of
Chatty Cathy dolls, maniacally and hysterically clattering on about
how broken we feel.
Meanwhile Sir Therapist of Yore nods gravely and says it's
marvelous how we are really "feeling our feelings" and we are "much improving"
even though we are piercing our own flesh with needles, visiting the tattoo shops and carving letters, notes, epitaphs and eulogies into our own flesh with whatever sharp objects we can find.
We spin like Mad Hatters on the teacup's saucer in Alice's Wonderland where she's obviously taken too many God forsaken pills and now we're on another of her Bad Trips. Can that woman never learn to just NOT eat the cake and drink the potion? Fuck!
We're waking up in the nuthouse, no idea how we've gotten there, overdosing on knowledge and starving to death emotionally because we're so fucking poor that all we've got is money. We chase men and women and skirts and heels and makeup and TV's and cars and boys and "kiss kiss" the cheek and 'hey how's it going, sexy' and one night stands and three night stands in some seedy hotel before your next botchy suicide attempt because no one, in all of the hospitals can look you in the face, through all of the psycho-babble and just tell you that you matter and that you're loved, which is all you really need to hear anyfuckingway. So you sleep with that person, fuckfest for three days straight, drugs and booze, forget the food, kick them out at the end, sloppy kiss and send em out the damn door - 'bye, darlin', it's been real but ya know how it goes,' and they cuss you out clear to their car. You turn back inside, take the rest of whatever you've got, wait for it to kick in and call the ambulance. Maybe you'll make it - maybe you wont.
When you were a kid they sold you some bullshit about an American Dream. You were brought up in the hood and you got stuck with this shit instead. But whatever. You'll take it you guess.


Sirens as you pass the fuck out.