For Love of the Disease

For Love of the Disease

Who is she?

Psychically organized but physically disorderly
Obsessive, compulsive?
I the former, she the latter
Obsessively loving and easily bruised
Which makes you beautiful,
Just because we are easily amused.

Aren’t dirty things so pretty?
Little objects that hurt the body
People who talk with their fingers
The way smoke shifts in sunlight
The way you can’t feel anything
If you hurt yourself enough.

Aren’t dirty things so pretty?
5:30 am and the sun is somewhere
Behind the black mountains
The air is blue and chilly, and
I get a ride out, but I’ve never met him before.
I’ve never met any of them before.
I still feel sick. I feel stupid. I feel bad.
I think, again, I’ve had enough.
Is this me?

Is this her?
I don’t mean to paint her so filthy
It’s just that Mom tells us,
“You smell like a gin soaked ashtray.”
She asks mother to forget about it.
“You can’t keep doing this.”

She’s a bad person, I tell myself.
But she’s not! She’s me, and I’m a good kid.
I do well in school; I do my chores,
All my friend's parents and all my parent’s friends
Fall head over heels in love with me.

And sometimes she wishes it weren’t so!
Because the lost boys have her heart
Yanking in their grimy hands
23 years old and fresh out of jail
But he’s got a job now!
Sure, he drinks every day,
But he kicked the crack thing, you know?

And yes, I know it’s only a matter of time
Before he goes crashing into
The back end of his own teenagerhood
Because they’re making the same stupid mistakes
They made ten years ago, when he was just thirteen
He might die now because of it. And if so,
Their souls will be too heavy to go to heaven.

But she’s still here,
She’s still in it, only seventeen
And she’s got so much potential! Mother tells her
Mom doesn’t have to worry too much
She’s young; she can handle this, right?
Or at least she’s too smart to forget
That precious thoughts mean more to me
Than the pills he has to take away pain.

They are fascinating and beautiful,
But this isn’t me.
Because I can’t sleep in a bed
With four strangers who stink.
I can’t sleep in that bed.
With those people.
I just can’t.

We have this cave in our brain
That I hide in sometimes, to think
I think about the important things
Like where I’m going in life,
And how many cigarettes she has left…

These are just pages in my book
The filth is just a chapter
I’ll sit for hours before bed, forgetting sleep,
To philosophize about the fables
That are actually happening to us.
To try to find meaning in her recklessness.
I always do.

There is always a moral to the story,
If we look hard enough.

I don’t know who I will be,
Or who I was back in time
I only know me now, and I sort of like her.

Some people pretend, but she wishes you could see
She is so in love with the world,
Sometimes it’s physically agonizing just to feel.
Really. She means it.
Her teeth ache and her skin crawls like an itchy jacket
The love in her blood boils inward to hate
She’s far too aware of everything happening
In the immediacy around her, and sometimes
The light is so intense she just wants to dim it, dull it,
Or shut it off.

She knows a few ways to do this,
Some are far healthier than you’d think.
Cleaning the house,
Writing about all the things she loves
Drawing a picture of something beautiful
Or napping with the love of her mother
And Tom Waits on the stereo at dusk.

Some ways to dim the pain
Are scum, are low. And she knows this.
Don’t blame her for it, please,
It’ll only make matters worse.

Two days he was “blowing rolls,”
That’s what he calls it. He said I should try it,
She said, “No.”
See, sometimes I don’t have to make the good decision,
Sometimes she makes it all on her own.

He said, “But now, I’m in love with everyone.”
She said, “So am I.”

That’s what we come down to, I think.
The center of me. Love.
That’s got to mean something.
Doesn’t that mean something?

She always says, “never doing that again,”
But its usually meaningless blather to try
And convince herself that she’s good.
Or me trying to convince myself I’m bad.
But we’re not.

So how much longer until we kick the habit?
That’s the question, isn’t it.
That’s been the question for as long as I can remember.