DeSade Drinking Games

Places get haunted

With love more than pain

Watching ghosts ballroom dance at my old dive bar

The main street stoops once we all OD'd or got clean

The empty bridge that splits through campus

where he'd see my mohawk from his dorm and rush out

The bench they dragged behind bouton hall where we all smoked

These mirages of familiar faces in strangers features

But that cant be him

Hes a decade older now

He quit smoking and works a 9-5 in management and has a kid

This psych ward is haunted by a little redhead girl

Who raced me through the hall in our traction socks

And danced to 00s RnB in the day room

She stabbed another girl to death at 16

And had just finished a 5 year sentence

In Bedford Hills Correctional

So shed forgotten to fear men

So Id twirl her or dip her like prince and princess

When I noticed the men watching the movement of her hips too closely

We plated jenga where if you lost

You had to tell your darkest secret

Was every girl molested

Was every girls first time a rape

Confessions of petty theft

And things we regret saying to our mothers

And that she once did sex stuff for drugs

Me too

What was your lowest price?

An 8ball she says, ashamed

I once sucked 2 cocks for a grape 4loko and 3 Newport hundreds

We laugh like only girls who have crossed those lines of womanhood can

I convinced her to get on the list for a trade school

And my own manic decision to quit my benzos

Inspired her to try without her own

Unallowed to exchange contact in high security

I wrote my number and insta in a copy of "Valley Of The Dolls"

And didnt ask for my copy back when I was discharged

But encouraged her to finish it

And she found my contacts written

in the page where Neely O'Hara is forced into the sack in the cold bath

And sent me her best wishes on new years

And of course shes not here this time

I hope shes home dying her hair

or making love to her dopeboy whod be out by now

I hope shes high and listening to TLC

But she was a fixture of this place

I look around for her at lunch, tray in hand

I read in my room for hours

Waiting for her to fetch me

And try to teach me another card game I cant keep track of

But she never comes

And theres nobody here to dance with

I fall asleep after vitals and nobody wakes me up for group

Theres nobody to give my Mac and Cheese to

I order it forgetting shes not there to eat in

And it stays untouched on my plate

And the 1-1 assigned to force me to finish meals

Makes a mark against me in her chart

I think we are supposed to fell in little loves

Like trading kandi bracelets with another girl

In the smoker's section of a rave with great E

Or when people very in love fall out of it

I think love only hurts because they insist

Real love lasts forever

But maybe its okay to have spent

Those years at beaches and light displays and arcades with him

Maybe its enough to have danced with a little redhead girl

In our gappy hospital gowns in the day room