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Everything Tastes Like Crack

everything tastes like crack
now i can't wash the flavour
out of my cigarettes or coffee mugs
the telephone
i've never been a puritan
i have my drugs of choice
everyone does:
TV kills
the Net kills
smoking kills
sex kills
booze kills
Prozac kills
coffee kills
and
               crack kills

so what can i tell you,
you who never calls me
except now when you have heard about
the rock i found in the alley behind my house
do i want to come over and play with you?
i guess you didn't hear how i flushed it away
what can i tell you
except to say
I watched at least one family
go down
i watched cops and robbers
up close and personal
i saw my lover's mama
buy crack from her six foot three son
i watched her fourteen year old daughter
carry two babies on her hips
their daddy was another dealer
her foster daddy
i watched them with my own eyes
waiting for rock
i watched the scars on malachi's hands
when he touched me later
on a cockroach covered couch
how his tongue tasted bitter of crack
though he had never tasted it
how his skin tasted like
all the sadness of rock-bottom despair
everything everything everything
tastes like crack.

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