City of Ice: a Family Tragedy

[theirishsea]

Cousin to
So many significant insignificant deaths
By drugs,
Recreational drugs,
The happy face kind,
The idiot ecstasies escaping from the lows,
So low there is not a bathysphere
That can plummet to such depths,
And on the solid surface of this life
The asphalt, a melted popsicle pooling
Sickly lipstick orange or hallucinogenic purple,
A low that’s all dull icky color
That you need an exceptional freeze of high,
A cryogenic healing dance so strong
The floor’s wood rattles,
The lights flash beams arctic-like,
Splash speckles,
The mind oozing honeysuckle,
But the highs of the “cool” bergs never last.
Bodies fall, tossed matches,
And the family is so low with darkness.
Lives lost before their time,
Though what is their time?
What was their time,
A clock with spring too tightly wound,
A predetermined divine cybernetic program,
The biologic circuitry overloaded, sparking, exploding too soon,
The sound of a needle on an old 45 disk:
Song finished,
Needle bouncing back,
Forward,
Bouncing back,
Memory of a hit tune,
Blue Moon,
Or Jim Morrison glassy-eyed,
Or Janis Joplin hollered, moaned out,
A time so forgotten now
In the new hard day’s nights of kids on the block,
Gunfire,
Rapping on doors,
Confiscating immaturity for themselves,
And so many deaths before,
Might as well have been Hotshepsut,
Insignificant significant deaths,
The future changed by their absence,
Kathleen, Broddy, my cousins---
And where is Meredith now?
Huddled in a corner frightened of Martians?
Memories?
Kathleen, a sweet girl, sparkles of humor,
Soft, quiet,
Until hard drugs mugged her,
Took her to unexplainable tears
And an overdose.
Her son,
Almost a decade later loading the same gun,
Maybe not intending to
But unloved guilty youth smashed against a wall.
What wall?
No hope at all,
And mother-grandmother Frances, father-grandfather Austin,
Aunt Marie (my mother),
Pin-pricked with rueful thoughts,
And they too insignificant,
Rumbles of cloud decades ago,
Memories,
a radio signal breaking up,
Traveling beyond the present range of family history,
But if I, in a brief moment,
Think back
I weep,
Hard rain weeping.
TV, computer on in the house,
I am in the alley of a vanished city,
A city of ice,
Weeping.

[theirishsea]

Probably have to clean the overabundance of words and images. This is the 4th draft and now it needs snipping, I guess.

There are little things done for a purpose but the disinterested reader, if they get this far, probably scratches their heads over---"mother-grandmother Frances....." Why is it necessary to point out explicitly the relationship of both mother and daughter, and mother and grandson, and, in most ways, not saying much explicitly about the relationships?

Have to work this out but if anybody wants to share what they like and what they don't I'm interested. This piece is still in progress.

[saw]

profound sadness permeates the lines like the skin on the arm of a tragic user...that helpless spiral of a hard as ice lifestyle choice....had a few friends OD...one very close to me...I got him cleaned up a couple of times at the VA, but it was only a temporary tonic...sad indeed

tough subject irish...handled tenderly

[the mingo]

The volley of images kept me on the frontlines until the last shot had been fired - - the last three lines, wham wham & WHAM!