“There’s a black cloud hovering over us kid, and like me,

it’ll follow you wherever you go. So, get used to it…”

An archfiend smog

is preying upon my soul,

and like Mother warned

my days will be plagued

by a curse, she burdened onto me

without consent.

I tried severing it,

but the more I rip and pull,

the deeper it burrows

like a desperate tick.

I’m a zombie vagabond

waking only to my requiem nightmare,

and I’m fucking sick of

the maggots clawing at my face

while buried neck-deep in shit

just waiting around to die.

Scarred

well before I abandoned the womb;

Born from a castaway,

hardly sixteen.

A child cradling a child

who wasn’t a miss-carriage

this time around.

I carried the bitterness of a mother,

once a twice-raped girl,

and wore her burdens just above my sleeve.

I earned that scout badge in a hospital bed

on a forgettable November morning.

A Scorpio with a stinger who has an affinity for being a prick,

and pre-loaded with a poison-coated tip for good measure.

I was born to fight or die trying

before I ever lived to see my first day.

I too felt raped.

My cards were dealt

upon the tables of inmates,

and I was taught how to play the game

before I knew how to hold‘em.

Forced to visit a prisoned father,

a narcissistic-arsonist;

A robber with a gun.

I was behind bars before I was behind bars—

A court-ordered indoctrination

became my baptism by fire.

TV screens and basketball games,

reclining chairs, and free food

didn’t look all that bad at 38 inches.

I was shown where men go to die,

and it looked a hell of a lot nicer than where I was living.

The world owed me everything

yet, its dues remained unpaid.

I binged cabinet doors and refrigerator drawers on the government’s dime

and drank my mother’s milk

she’d laced with Southern Comfort and cigarettes

to save money.

Many nights, she avoided a bathroom grave,

while I held her head above the drowning line.

I flushed that disgrace and wiped chunks from her face

while she slept on a linoleum bed,

then I scarfed down mental health issues for supper—

Never wasting those generous leftovers for breakfast.

Was this nature, or nurture,

or is this fucking “black cloud” actually real?

I was taught the comforts of living near death

so, I never needed to get a life.

I knelt before the gateway,

but it was vaster than curiosity itself

and I hadn’t a grip, so it sucked me in.

No sky to part, no lucid light—only a jade Cumulonimbus.

Sunny days became head-rolls on moonlit sidewalks.

Cocktails of uppers and downers, chasers and shooters, X and sex—

I was a night jackal, inviting a sunrise I never longed to see

because chasing dealers with baseball bats

and paying whores with fake hash seemed more exciting

then a god-damned repeating dot on the horizon—

until all I saw were dots on the horizon.

Darkness envelops those who invite it to dinner, and it’s hungry—

A jackal only bites a turned back, sometimes just for the taste,

until one day you’re startled back to life choking on vomit,

while someone else holds your head above that toilet swirl,

and only then do you rub elbows with your mother.

Sometimes it takes having to tango with death,

to appreciate the waltz of life.

For years I was just waiting around to die

and I suppose I did…

…but even death didn’t want me.

So here I am.

It’s just me and this Jade cloud suspended above.

and it’s my only certainty.

© 2023 Chris Sadhill