Broken Bad Marionette

I look at your yellow rotted teeth

trying to ignore the pungency of

ammonia and sweat as I watch

your broken soul peek out from

behind your dark encircled eyes.

Life's abandoned marionette

with all your strings cut,

jerking around on my couch as

you tap your uncoordinated feet

like a rogue morse code machine.

Your meth-using parents cut most

of your strings before you

were eight years-old and then

taught you how to cut

your own strings,

hurtling you into a lifetime

of self-destruction.

The only escape from the pain

is the glass bubble,

a spiraling curl of greenish smoke

spreading like spilled ink to blot

out the agony of your very existence.

Yet you ask me to fix you,

to re-attach the strings

of your life.

But right now, we both

know you'll just cut them again.

It's what you know.

It's what you've become.

It's what you are.

Unless

you make a decision from

somewhere deep down inside your

fractured psyche that

you can no longer go on living/dying

like this every day.

And when you make that decision,

clawing your way through the

thick curtains of ruptured synapes,

swatting away the meth mites of formication

running up and down your vein-blown arms

and lay seige to the iron fortress of

your self-imposed hell,

I'll be here for you

like a modern-day Geppetto.

To re-attach the strings onto

this eight year-old Pinnochio

so that he can dance again

and finally say

"I'm a real boy!"