Solve my issues, I’d say to myself

helplessly.

I concealed myself
from the rawboned one
who’d stumble past the threshold
and from the echoing thump of
liquor-infused boots
on the sapped timber staircase
under which I dreamt by dark;
I know he’d always hear the uneven pulsation
of my sticky
h          e  a       r                 t.

Macabre memories,
his scorched tendrils,
the swirling fumes of his cigarette, of his mind,
his blackened skin
and thinning muscles;
the way he’d stare at the ceiling—static bones, a sickly green—
while I’d cry, waiting for motion,
breathing, anything but
his hacking cough,
his dull, subconscious shriek for rescue.

I still shudder at
          the frayed lungs
of the madman,
of the sociopathic outline of a being
which I could never color in
with the splintered crayons
now miles deep in his digestive tract.

I guess the spirits in the cellar, too, weren’t enough
to slake his thirst
for queasy nights and cussing . . .

Sip by sip,
he drew closer to his expiration date,
like the milk, coagulated, in the 78-degree “refrigerator,”
the sweatbox strewn with warm alcohol and mutated spiders,
as I inched sheepishly
under my weary staircase
into quarantine.

Escapists,
           like him, like me,
we’re a chain reaction—
one sets off another,
and soon
we’re all gone,
consumed by the dependency.
We’re in our own
         world
                 now.