November 12, 2008

Just know that I wouldn’t have written this is I didn’t love you so damn much.

She loses everything

Bipolar Demigod

Never lets me sit shotgun,

No amount of inpatient, outpatient, group, individual, probation, or drug tests

Can keep her from a life of destruction

She’s late to everything

Wears chaos in her hair

Cover-up line thick on her jaw

I never let her borrow any of my white clothes anymore

I’m always there when she scrubs her liver clean with alcohol

Instead of peroxide

I’m always the one holding her hair back

While she vomits new memories

Into a toilet bowl

Passed out drunk

But I am no savior

I want to cut her black wings open

Bury bleeding feathers in my cheeks

But she is the hamster

Going round on her wheel again

Getting the spins

She’ll try to push the top off of her cage

If you don’t close it tight enough

Sleep in her food bowl

Bite if you startle her

What you need to understand is that

Missy doesn’t take shit from anyone

She is the queen of persuasion

Can convince your wallet out of your pocket

She could persuade me that my name isn’t Kerri

Would be a lawyer if it didn’t take so much damn effort

She is the only girl who I can admit

Would beat the shit out of me in a fight,

Always gets too angry

Too quickly.

Always one cigarette puff away from an O-ringed miracle

Drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s to wash down the New Year

The strip club was closed

She didn’t want to sleep alone

Wanted to find drugs to sustain her buzz

Tries to fight me when we’re drunk

I told her to choose cocaine or me

She told me to get the fuck out of the car

She was strapped to the hospital bed that night,

My best friend.

Fist fighting cops with empty clenched hands

I wished her fists would bud flowers like lotus

But I never liked tending gardens.

She lives in the now,

Doesn’t think about the repercussions of stupid shit she does,

Like getting a rainbow tattooed between her boobs

Drunk in the city on Saint Patty’s day

Like driving drunk

The first time she totaled our friend’s mom’s car

The second time the cops got her.

She looks for love from random strangers

Because she hates herself

And seeks affection from everybody else

Obsessed with measuring her body in caterpillar inches

Hates the way she looks in jeans

Yet slips on a mini skirt

She used to blame bruises from her abusive boyfriend on me

Telling her parents, “Oh no, they’re just from Kerri, we were just fucking around”

But her multi-colored map outlined his knuckles

Not foreplay

She rationalizes that she hit him first

So naturally

He would hit her back

That napoleon complex little shit head

Kept her blindfolded with fists better than he ever could with love

We need flashlight fingers to see at these depths

Cause she reached rock bottom a long time ago

No matter her shoebox nightlight

She can never find her way home without me

I would set the ocean on fire if I thought it would save her

Been scratching glow in the dark wishes

On the breadcrumbs of her life path

For her to find her way back to me

After all this

I don’t think she’ll die young

But she just may be the reason why I might

[PLEASE tell me the differences between these two poems that you liked/disliked. what was lost/gained in the different versions?]