I've always felt weird walking into bars. I've always felt weird doing something I'm working on for too long, because I feel like if I achieve any measure of success in it that should be the stopping point lest I cannot maintain the peak I've come to. Better to quit on a high note right?

That's what I always do and so I walk into a bar. I walk into a bar and immediately feel uncomfortable if I'm not already drunk. The place people come to die slowly and fry mozzarella sticks fast to die even more quickly. I plop down on a bar stool and the bartender eventually makes their way around to me and asks me what I would like to drink. I order a beer, or a mixed drink. My most common concoction being a beer and a shot of vodka or three.

I've never been someone who resigned themselves to a fruitless life but it feels like less and less fruit is in my future. Very little in my past. In terms of the orchard keeper I have very little more than a barren wasteland like a orange farmer who thought it would be a great idea to plant in South Dakota at the turn of the century. Encountering a dust bowl the second seeds were planted.

It was better than before, better than when I felt like for the rest of my life I'd be stuck in my rack shivering and writhing in pain from alcohol withdrawal. It was better when I walked into the bar that I could discount every aspiration and ambition I once had within those four walls that made me as happy as can be but destroyed me. The bartender greeted me with a smile. Pretended I was personable. Pretended that I was meant to be there. Checked off every box that was necessary to keep me there on some misguided, unfounded goal to fuck her. Bartenders know exactly what they're doing.

It was dark, dank, and private. The only light I saw was from the glint of the black out blinds that covered every window. The ring of the blackjack machine was as artificial as everyone else's plastered drunk smile that made me nauseated and cajoling at the same time. I felt extra insecure on top of what I typically am insecure about due to the lack of teeth incurred by the bottle which had introduced itself to my face.

Life is a cheap bottle of vodka you pull from a plastic bottle. That you pulled from a plastic coated metal shelf on the bottom shelf. The shelf was dusty and you looked dustier. The price label that sticks out like a fat lady trying to fit into her wedding dress in a trailer park high on her 4th day of a crack binge has been there since 1996.

Cheap vodka reminds me of my life. Settling for the lowest common denominator because I don't think anything else will ever make me feel okay. Even when it smacks me right in the face.

Like I get into a fight with a guy somewhere and he slaps me right in the face with a bottle of Grey Goose and I feel the top of the line merchandising advertise worthy coating on the glass bottle. How cold it still is because of it's proper packaging. How it doesn't break across my face and knocks me the fuck out as well as a few teeth.

I think no way man. Shit that was pure luck. Much rather have grabbed a cheap glass bottle of vodka. ALWAYS gets the job done and it's fucking cheap and you can get drunk with the bottle you buy after you run the guys pockets. This one definitely breaks on faces.

When I wake up in a puddle of my own blood, I begin to ponder how the metaphorical is dancing in a circle around my ammonia laden brain. Then I think I shouldn't think such thoughts, because god forbid they manifested wet brain at my young tender age.. fuck I'm not so young anymore man. Going to ignore that thought too, as I shake my head vigorously and likely exacerbate the guaranteed concussion I am currently suffering from.

Checking my teeth, and horrified to discover some of my choice ones missing. I immediately wanted to get drunk. Did he run my pockets? No he didn't. I guess this was close enough to the French Quarter that he dipped the second he dabbled with nearly rendering me a vegetable with a liquor bottle.

I try to clean myself off the best I can, and then walk my drunk, disheveled, decompensating quickly, debilitated emotionally self to the nearest corner store bodega. I have not a single thought in my head. All I know is I feel like shit, and I know why, and no need to think about any of them.

We all know how we spiral mentally when the enormity of the hard lives we lived and undertook and didn't undertake come crashing down on us quite often due to our own volition I daresay always by the volitive of our own intrusive dickhead subconscious trying to bully us like an inner city gang discovering a leaning heroin addict and smacking him in the face hard as they can repeatedly attempting to have him experience a relatively severe fall at that angle. Those kids don't realize that anyone can die.

It's vulgar and cruel but it's fun is all that they know. Even the people they kill with the .38's and 9mm's in their pockets they honestly don't have any accurate conception of that they are no longer with us on this earth and instead died on a sdiewalk in a pile of their own blood, and the blood of everyone who had died in baltimore and seeped into the sidewalk and gutters and grassy shit lawns that barely resemble one. At least they aren't alone as the souls of each person yell out and whisper rather creepily how they died and why they aren't in heaven and how they should stay because you know if you a true Baltimore local you NEVER FUCKING LEAVE BALTIMORE.

Bad places, good places, the worst places, abominable places like where a fucking snowman lives in the artic circle in some shit hole Russian village where everyone the entire population since the beginning of that village existence has died of liver cirohssis and incest related genetic malformities all these places have a terrible habit of sucking you into their gravitational pull through comfortability, through trauma, through dead friends who though no longer living are your tether to a place that will one day prematurely cause your own. The THREE F'S, FENTANYL FIREARMS FOUR BY FOURS.

How odd to go from your largest challenge in life being staying alive, to your largest challenge in life becoming living.

Destroying yourself because of the things you saw while staying alive, because of the things you did to stay alive, and because of the people who didn't live. What a mind fuck.

I’m in the passenger seat of my friend’s car on a backroad in rural Maryland. We’re both well over the legal limit, and up to no good. At this point in my life I love this feeling of reckless abandon, it is literally all that I live for. The seats are plush, it’s a police auction Crown Vic, with those comfy upholstered seats that feel nice against your back, and a bucket seat in the middle instead of a center console. It’s a roomy vehicle to say the least, and floats like a cloud, you could be hitting 100 miles per hour and not tell the difference.

As I revel in the warmth of the last few beers I chugged, and watch my friend lazily swerve from one side of the road to the other, as the brights of the headlights illuminate the way forward in the jet-black steely Maryland winter night. I laugh but can’t hear myself laugh because the music is up too loud. I pull a pack of Newport's out of my pocket and put one to my mouth, light it. Crack the window ever so slightly so as not to let the heat out. The foliage on either side of the two-way, narrow backroad jumps out at us from either side as if alive, as the head lights swerve from one side to the other, with the steering.

The party we had been to was a bonfire in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trailers. It had been a kind of bizarre night in that we didn’t stay at the party long, didn’t seem to have known many people there, and were scrambling around to get this or that drug or drink the entire time. I was happy to be on my way back with my overly intoxicated ride. My entire life was based solely upon a copious addiction to multiple substances, and a healthy dose of mental illness to self-medicate into my self-destructive holes of existence. The hopeless abandon of any responsibility or awareness of my own mortality seemed to be a welcome accompaniment to the desperate escapism that our lives all were. From party, to party in random strangers home where we stole jewelry and TV’s and liquor, to the neighborhood watering holes, clubs, the street corners of our cities and more.

I truthfully don’t have a whole lot of memory associated with the rest of the ride home beyond that we did indeed arrive back at the crib. I woke up in my bed, found my friend in the bedroom adjacent, and woke him up to the tune of “waddup fag”. This was the routine for nearly every weekend night, and the week nights if the opportunity presented itself. We were in a constant state of intoxication for years. Even when we weren’t intoxicated, the next thought was always how we were going to reach that state again.

Blue and gray

Fentanyl killed my homeboy today

Didn’t have time to think

Didn’t have time to pray

He was that ray of sunshine that

Both you and I can’t deny

With that stupid dumb goofy ass smile

And that warm embrace that loved nearly

Everybody and Everything

One of the good ones

Taken from this earth

Before his light got the chance to sing

I wish my words didn’t have a single fucking ring

I promise you if I could trade any ounce of ability

For my boys lividity

Breath and dignity

I’d take it all back to god in one day

But today I can’t

It’s a damn shame and I know that

But we can’t go back

I wish my mans thought about that

Before he pulled back

On that strap

I think we've suffered enough we've,

Come around the shit enough,

Dead or in the bed

Fiending or fentanyl driven

Doesn’t matter the talent they been given

Pissing shit away is what the details in

Gray is the way every body lay

In the coffin, so often

Leaving the living

Searching for a reason

A cause to comfort in

Every demonstration of my lack

Lackin tact and

Social graces because

Everytime I talk, or walk, or see a kid drawing [on the sidewalk] in chalk

I see their faces

My mind traces the steps they once took

Down the same city streets god’s somehow graced me to be

Walking down

When I know I didn’t deserve it more than they did

So I head into a old bar I used to get kicked out of

Drink too much vodka

Slam somebodies head in wit a mug

Because all I know is lashing out

Then passing out

It's hard to break a habit

When you live in trauma

You’re the only one there to stop you

Why when it’s all you can do to stuff it down

Lest you live with a frown

Permafrown on your face

Giving new definition the RBF

SAY IT WITCHA CHEST

We used to say

Calling each other gay

For expressing feelings

That shit flew the fuck out the window

When homies started falling like leaves out a tree yo

Seen professionally tough

Upset in the rough

Tears falling down their faces

When does the struggle stop

I can't even begin to keep my shit straight bro

Fuck being hard

I just want the homies to not depart

Second time around the happiness

Impossible to smile at the righteousness

The intriguing drug use

Keeps my friends dead and

I’m wounded to every

Story that I can’t see when

I tell it to myself in my head as I walk down the street,

In the same places that they used to be

The sun comes up,

If I’ve gone to sleep,

Then I wake up in panic,

Where the fuck am I,

Who am I,

Where’s my exits,

Where’s my weapon,

Everyday I ponder a simpler life,

Less full of mental issues and strife,

I wonder what could’ve been,

The relationships and women leaving,

The drug use and alcohol abuse wreaking,

Numb is all I know,

In my destroyed and ruined relationships it shows,

But I don’t ponder too long,

No one could’ve known that living suffering went this low,

But I never took the largest blow,

They say death comes in threes and I’m inclined to agree,

The names forever branded and always will be,

Die not in vain but forever with me,

Live I will for you and for me.

Every single day I wake,

I do a double take,

I remember the fate I choose to create,

Failure and self sabotage has since been my daily state

A lot of days,

Like a punch in the gut

I try to finesse myself,

destress myself,

Make lame excuses,

but the truth is,

I really freaking detest myself,

Everyday I beat the shit out of me,

As if someday it’ll set me free,

from one day a while past 1993,

When I made a mistake,

That set in motion more self loathing,

More self hatred more destructive force,

More than anyone could ever take,

I can say failure gives and failure takes,

Now I know my strength,

It took a hell of a long time to break me,

But as empty as I am I still give thanks,

Broken and empty but a man cautious in his mistakes.