I awoke from a nightmare of my own devising

and came back into the one we shared:

it was 4am and she was next to me

overdosing on cocaine

she shimmied and shook, naked and

smeared brown from the previous night’s

frenzied,

compulsive injecting

eyes rolled back into her head

arms twisting at arcane

spastic angles

a sad

bruised

98-pound

St. Vitus

amidst the screaming

and the phone calls

and the ambulance

and the restraints

she looked at me

and said

“Why?

Why did you let me wake up?”

but one sound

above the screams and the

crying and the sirens

still reverberates in my head

and that was the sound

of the paramedic’s

heavy, solid boots

treading on and crunching underfoot

the remnants

of a life imploded

*this is a poem from Tony O’Neill’s first book of poetry entitled Songs From The Shooting Gallery from Burning Shore Press