“go save his life” says russ.
“why not you?”
“I did it last time. and the time before that.”
russ is right. he has single-handedly kept phil
breathing
through cardiac arrest after o.d. on several
occasions.

this time it is my turn to go

when I get there
phil’s door is ajar
the cat chews phil’s toe.
the carpet is a debris-strewn battlefield

covered by
uncooked
rice
macaroni
blood-rimmed pizza crusts
curved like nail clippings cut too close
and piles of excrement
most too large to have come from a cat

the toe
is tough
and will not yield blood for the cat
or even awaken phil
(who knows that cat’s plan?)

“phil!”
“goddamnit, what!”
he shakes his foot out of the cat’s mouth
“fucking cat keeps biting my toe”
there is hardly enough meat on phil to make a
snack

his sunken eyes are dull and his cheekbones
peer out over unwashed patches of scruff
“phil, the cat’s hungry”

phil is assigned to the first of five more recovery
centers
that will only prolong what was inevitable
from his first self-inflictions

when he drops dead onto the bathroom floor of his
sober living
halfway house
with a needle in his arm
nine years later
no one is really
surprised

the surprise comes
the first time
when after he died

he sends me an email from beyond the grave
I see his email address
appear
in the
from
column

phillyjoe77@yahoo.com

my own blood runs cold

the subject line is typical phil: Hey There

I move the mouse to open the email
picturing the internet cafe in the afterlife
he had sent that message from
what will it say? “thanks for trying to save my life?”
“no thanks for trying to save my life?”
“my life was my own and I did with it what I did”

“see ya?”

I click the message open

it is the kind of spam we see all too often

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