Heroin

That night acutely cold with your sweat,
too peculiarly cold for a summer's darkness,
reminded that prior dreams of your death
imagined less than this body before me,
begrudgingly alive, swaying in sickness like a crude
branch in autumn's genocide.
They wrapped you hap-hazard in an E.R. blanket;
the only shelter for your dim skin
wearing spider web thin over the war raging in your veins.
That night I mourned in floods;
droplets drenching my soul for each battered hair
on your shaven head:
But behind the eyes I stoically used to reassure you with
in that grotesquely dark and vacant hospital lot.
I'd have damned you, but you cried;
moved to such a sadness by the solstice of your shame.