This collection was born from the experience of walking with someone tortured by childhood abuse through a decade of addiction and ultimately death.  It was hard to reread and edit these poems but I know it is time to let them go.  They will resonate with those who have been through the same darkness, probably alienate those who have not.  Members of my beloved online Hardcore Literature Bookclub who were all in for Infinite Jest will get it.  Some poems relate to others who crossed over - Last Rites, Dreamcatcher.

Religious metaphor invades some of the poems, this happened unconsciously while I was writing.  I subsequently learned from cognitive neuroscience that religiosity and addiction inhabit the same part of the brain.  Hence the brilliance of the AA and NA approach.

I see in many of the poems all the complicated emotions I went through - sadness, doubt, confusion, hope, fear, despair and sheer determination.  The hardest part of it all was not the typical progression through overdoses, rehabs, jail and homelessness, but witnessing a flashback to his childhood.  It was so overwhelming that from time to time I have flashbacks to his flashback. There was also the difficulty of bearing up under the judgmentalism and schadenfreude of people who, seeing that he looked like he had everything, wrote him off as some spoiled rich kid whose recreational habit got the better of him.  

When we first met he told me ‘people like us’ always find each other.  Like us?  We had nothing in common outside of our workplace.  He was 25 years younger, from a rich family, looked like a supermodel, and aside from his work as an Oracle DBA loved nothing more than benching three plates at the gym.    It took him a week to tell me he was on a heavy regime of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, and an opiod treatment called suboxone.  Half of opiod addicts survive to live a long life, I was hopeful.  It took another two years for him to tell me what had happened to him, and I knew he would not make it, but committed to walk with him to the end.  There is a Buddhist precept that you must not walk away from suffering, I fully embraced it.

As regards the ‘like us’ observation, turned out he was right.  While I had always seen myself as high-strung and spaced out I discovered it is in fact PTSD and dissociation.  Out of the mouths of babes.

By the end of the decade he was unrecognizable, his body intact but if you looked into his eyes, there was no one there.  He succeeded in obliterating the trauma by obliterating himself.  He somehow made his way back to the city where his parents lived in one last attempt at salvation.  I never saw him again.  We had three cats, and two years ago my orange boy Chester died of a Gabapentin overdose used to treat cancer pain.  A sign I overlooked.  Six months later my beautiful Grace passed on.  It brought me the courage to inquire about him, and not to my surprise, he succumbed 3 months before Chester.  I hope they are now all together and at peace.  RIP, Eric.