These Dying Hours

These Dying Hours

Late afternoons that drank themselves to dusk,
where not filled with voices that screamed
for morphine, or reeked of smoked cannabis,
which came from the back bathroom,
his sister hiding, to smoke, to vomit.

These dying hours were spent pumping peddles
between home and the pharmacy,
getting her fix again. Some nights he got lost,
chased by Lucifer himself, before
Michael would drag him down a dead end,
and beat him in an alleyway.
A great battle was always trapped
in the headlights brightening him from behind,
never, and always catching up.

His bicycle was stolen later that summer,
but not before it helped him
break the sound barrier, crashing through tides that bound
life still and imperfect, opening his eyes
to a world of colors without shapes,
a world that could not scream or yell,
but only glide by in stop still motion,
like clouds at thirty thousand feet,
held captive on the cover of a National Geographic.

It was a Friday night when his mother
came in flushed with some electric rage,
rushing at him, screaming, “Nanna’s ran out,
that’s your fault! Go to the pharmacy.”
He ignored her, staring off into the television.
She hit him.

Passing her room, Nanna smiled sad,
stroking her IV, unable to speak
or spit, or wretch. She could only sit.

Pulling out of the drive, away
into the night, he would not cry,
he would just go, go faster,
creating a whirlwind of momentum
that could not stop, that could
not find him in the night.
He passed the pharmacy and saw the pharmacist closing.
Passing him there in the waking darkness,
from across the street the pharmacist heard
the sound of silent tires, and stared out
through the nothingness that separated them.
The boy’s shadow stopped as if time stopped,
and the old man’s eyes appeared then vanished.
Tipping his hat gently towards the boy’s shadow, he knew,
and turned and walked away.