Brian McCracken performs "Serenity" - Mercury Cafe 8/2011
Channel: Brian McCracken
Date: 2012-05-22

Brian McCracken performs his poem "Serenity" at Denver's Mercury Cafe Poetry Slam.

For more info on Brian visit:

www.ReverbNation.com/brianmccracken
www.facebook.com/brian.mc.catalyst

Lyrics:

Serenity

this poem 
is for the drug addicts—the dope
fiends. 
this poem is
is for ninety pound bodies shriveling in gutters
like dried fruit.
this is for those who shoot.
this is for my brothers and sisters
who dance with the devil daily
drown in dope
without a hope of life outside the needle and the spoon.
and for some, this poem couldn't arrive too soon.

this poem 
is for you.
you whose disease is a death sentence,
your cancer a crime.
you who is locked up for possession
without a hope of redemption
for your child who is missing you
and doesn't understand why the drug war nabbed her daddy.
families broken and out of harmony.
where's the real armed robbery?

this poem 
is you who grew up comfortable
but were missing something.
who graduated from the school bus to the squad car,
the pen to a magnum.
smack 
is the main line out of the middle class
into an early grave.
this is for the track marks you paved.

this poem
is for you who is on the wait list
for an underfunded treatment center
for three months
deciding between
triage through treatment
or deliverance through death.
anything to stop the suffering.

this poem 
is reality.
i know this poem.

this poem 
is for me.
me who used to pick pieces of pill out of the carpet,
snorting whatever came along with the catch.
me who found happiness in an orange bottle.
me for whom the birds chirping in the morning would
produce Paranoia.
me who hallucinated for five days being awake.
me who heard gunshots and lived in psychotic delusions.
me who got clean.
me who no longer lives between high speed chases
and post-mania comas under the covers.
this poem is for worried mothers.

this poem 
is for hope.
it is for two years clean and serene,
finally again a human being.
this poem is for no longer being an animal
a slave to my desires.
this is for skin clear of scabs,
face full of color and complexion.
this poem is for a job, an education and getting published.
this poem is for family proud to call me their's. 
this poem is for hope.

but this poem 
is also for the fallen,
for the soldiers
fighting in the trenches of southeast DC and Baltimore
and what is more,
this poem is for my dead kin who struggle no more.
for those who
finally gave up,
who gave up and
greeted the reaper
in the back seat of
a beat up Caddy
with not an
ounce
of body fat,
emaciated skeletons
dead
at 
23.
this poem is an epitaph.

this is a poem 
against all odds.
this poem should be six feet under
but it defies gravity.
i defy gravity!
i defy death!