Lament.

I wonder what it is that drives us to mythologise the supposed rebellion and freedom of junkies?

I  have stood as guilty as anyone on this front and have now had yet another torn from my life.I will get to that….But you know what? I am done with it.Done.There is no poetry or honor.It’s a fucking great big rort and a thief.

Death or jail.

Can you please tell me this? How,exactly, is it rock and roll to be a slave? Where the fuck is it punk to be a sheep? Tell me do. Life is tiring enough doncha find and there you go chaining your self to the chemical equivalent of a formula one car cross bred with a rabid rottweiler? Go team.You are over.You are done every for the rest of your life.

And I am the dick who will put flowers on your grave.I am the one who has to miss you.Who will strain in time to remember the cadence of your voice,the touch of you bitten fingers on the back of my hand as I sit and write in all night cafes.I look up and smile.

fuck you/love you/fuck you asshole.im sorry i dont mean it untill i do but im gonna miss you miss you miss you my fresh dead friend.

With the amount of judgement thrown at recovering addicts who are trying to get well I can see why they think that its not worth the bother.That they should go back and be done with it.It’s a hard cross to bear.Even when you have been clean a while,years for that matter,some people will still tar you with the same brush.It’s hard to take.I think it was Fitzgerald who said “There are no second acts in American life.”

I don’t think that its exclusive to America .It is a universal disdain.

Elvis only knows that there are members of my lost and not lamented supposed family who still see and remember me as the teen-aged habit I once was.Never mind what I have done sober in the many,many years since my magnificent fall from grace.

The trick is to get out and stay out.

But my latest loss did not.She came back and it killed her.

CL was so thin and so very small.I could see the machinations of her blood beneath the ragged veins in her fine scared wrists.Almost transparent ,a cocaine fueled axolotl.She had a lisp and crooked smile that all at once exposed and hid the rotted grey stumps set in her jaw.She was ill.A grand a day kind of sick, all forty one kilos of her.She was so kind to me at the pinnacle of the heartbreak that I thought would kill me and I in turn thought that she would outlast us all.

It never gets any easier.

I am not a stupid woman.I know how it ends.Dead or incarcerated.And it has stolen and continues to steal so many from me.

I love all the crap that I told myself as I sobbed my heart out on the train.Pathetic bonmots of pure fantasy fueled bullshit.That if you live by the sword and so on.

Me? I get high on hate.I medicate my damage with miles run and lines written.With seething self hated and abstinence.At times,I can’t lie, I envy them and their religion.That’s where the myth making comes in.We romanticise them because they have truly given up.Its harder than it looks and takes allot of work.Hundreds of dollars a day must be earned for that kind of amnesty.I don’t have it in me.I never did.

My shrink asked me once what keeps me clean.”Vanity” I replied only half kidding.

I remembered the last dirty room I sat in doing watch over a friend who had shot too much.(dont let me die/i wont/get the ice if i/dude,i wont/dont fall asleep or/dude,i fucking wont/thanks/its cool/ya reckon?/nah/and we laugh cause what the hell else are ya gonna do?) I read a book by the window and sat vigil on an almost overdose once again wondering how and why I find myself in these places.Knowing that we are all lost in one way or another and that some one has to bear witness and that tonight, it is me.I circled her thin arm as she teased an almost non existent vein from the hamburger abscess that scaled and scared her arm like some kind of infected moss or mold.

At least you can visit them in jail…..

She lay in her own waste for days felled by a massive stroke.A stroke. They told her at the hospital,a scant few months prior,  that if she didn’t get the valve in her heart replaced that her days were numbered and if she did she would never be able to shoot coke again.When I saw her on the street she still had the I.V port attached to the side of here neck like some kind of freshly hatched alien.I watched fascinated as a rivulet of pale pink fluid ran elegantly to pool in the cave of her starved collar bone.

So she knew.She called the shot.

Oh.Didn’t you know? In the end that’s pretty much the only vein that’s left to the professionals in the end.As you read this I want you to take your hand and find the pulse on your neck. Got it? That big meaty artery under you fingers? Feel it? That’s one fuck of a highway right there ain’t it? That’s your life pounding right along. Straight to your heart.

Now,back to junkie veinology 101….When you have successfully blown out your arms and ankles,and you will, when you are trying to catch the veins in your feet and hands with teeny-tiny insulin needles ,well,when all those wells have run dry you are down to  the big artery in you groin or the gold mine that is throbbing beneath your fingers right now.

That’s it.All those minuscule millions of miles of vascular variety and you have 2 options left.Amazing how we chose to destroy ourselves isn’t it?

I hugged her too tight but she didn’t flinch.

So that’s that.She knew and she made her decision.I wish that it had of been like a fuse.Just blown .Done.Finite. Three days.Three agonizing days.Paralyzed in her own waste and unable to call for help.Three days watching the sun rise and set outside her window.Her lips falling off with dehydration.When they finally came and got her into the ambulance her organs took a bow one by one and shut down.

She used to get angry at me for caring.For kindness.For recognising her because I know how wretched I am too.

Gone.

She was better than all the suits and fakes I see day in and day out.All the clowns that I deal with on the door on a saturday night,hopped up on pill’s with mummy and daddy as a safety net back on the northern beaches.They live and she dies?

I am so fucking angry tonight that my vision is blurring.

Dead or Jail.Just magic.

And I get left behind.

And you question my faith?

(R.I.P CL.xxx)