A Poetry of the Dead & the Dying || Alec Juarez

by Alec Juarez

now tell me

have you ever been witness

to

extended-release suicide

metered out s l o w l y over time

blackout nights numb faces 

watching your friends fade

and i mean really fade away

bit by bit hit by

hit and never really satisfied

i mean never satisfied i’m talking

a chronic desire to escape the present

moment this moment right

here right now are you following me now

it looks different for everybody

in my case it came in 1 gram bags

20 dollar rocks and a mountain of empties

growing in my kitchen like mold 

i got better i really did but then

i got way worse chopping up

china white in the bathroom again

i’m telling you

i’ve personally

seen the best minds of my generation

destroyed from the inside out

but never no i would never

call it madness no if anything

they’re icarus-types

no this world wasn’t too much for them

they were too much for this world

i still remember the day Al died

shot himself in the head with his dad’s gun

behind an elementary school late at night

kids found him during morning recess the next day

he’d been teaching english in thailand

saw some fucked up stuff

his note said people just weren’t nice

enough to each other in this world

he wasn’t wrong.

II.

well they say that your heart is a muscle

the size of your fist

i guess mine’s out of shape

Image Credit: Unsplash

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alec Juarez is a non-binary Latinx writer from Grand Rapids, MI in recovery from addiction to heroin and crack cocaine.