Poetry | Journal

You’re going to die, and it keeps me up at night.
Your eulogy is a poem I don’t want to write.
I don’t sleep, waiting for the phone call that you’ve been found
with a landscape of poppy flowers blooming down the side of your pillowcase.
I don’t sleep, thinking of those who wear the mask of friendship
for a discount on bags of pot that ultimately fund your habit.
I stay up reciting the poem I wrote Juliette two years ago
when she died of the overdose you swore changed your approach
to selling drugs.
It’s the only thing you ever loved more than yourself.
From nobody to king pin on campus selling cannabis gave you a status
a name, you went from quiet kid
to molly kid
to hey got any more of that fire kid
you love every second of it. No longer a kid.
No longer the nintendo playing friend who’d swing with me for hours at the park,
became the phone never silent —gotta make a run —be right back
pay no attention to that it’s just pot.
It’s just addreall traded for pot,
just xanax someone didn’t want
just doing business what more do I want
just respect this is your job
just.
That old commercial, that said pot was the gateway to addiction
fell short for the average user, the low risk abusers, not you no
pot is the gateway for greedy dealers who can’t keep their fingers
out of their own cookie jar.
After all, cocaine was just tonight and
if you just balance out the downers with uppers
because your body no longer could recover on it’s own,
you lost control.
You took a bottle of Jäger to wash the off label remedy down
and pushed me across the room.
I left you.
Now with every innocent bag of weed
they buy you another spoon another hit
and drive a shovel another inch
deeper into your grave.
And there’s nothing I can do but christ,
the sound of earth crunching keeps me awake.
Every night.