Poem: The Enabler

graveyard running for health: brighter red in my blood, deeper green in the grass,
to make my compulsion for escape seem less desperate

Pines crowd the borders, wind-crashed, filling my heart with their violent sing/song
The beat is my pulse in proximity to death

Salt on my shoes from the ancient sea, its absence washes over me--
not the first or the last to fear what lies under the sparkling mineralized clay;
not the first or the last afflicted with living loss, or to hear the wind scream "run"

I live around your obsessions,
schedule my time, body, and depression to accommodate the crystalline dreams, your white hot psychoses, your children

Cause I prefer the chaos, car
crashed breakdowns and your endless hunger; would rather face
the threat of your living noise than the peace of your ghostly absences

But there's no love beneath it; just an empty space, a courtyard that I built
for you to fill;
a black television set dedicated
to your channel.

I run in circles around your family plots
the headstones read like the book of your life, a repetition
of a single addictive story with interchangeable names and their substances:
sister, cousin, aunt, grandfather
burned out, screaming with their mouths full of salt
rejecting the peace of the grave to stab out with guilt-edged knives

"you should have helped me" me me

for a while, we thought we beat their insanity,
that name on the headstones that ebbs and flows with diamond millions until it bursts
like boils to spill out in psychotic floods across the West Desert...
But that's the funny thing about crazy. You never see its pox on your own face.

My own delusions used to swallow me as I drank them down, always
withyouforyouinyouconsumingyou,
two snakes, endlessly swallowing each other,
never starve. Ah, love.

Now it's quiet and my limbic response says:
"run"

But a mile or a marathon, it doesn't matter; when I'm done I'll call
You.

Cause I feel dead when I'm alone.