Why Did He Die

Because no one told him

The happy pills made

The happy juice toxic

he died

Not knowing relief was on the way

After trading his grief for intoxication

He didn’t realize

The switch from the crutch of booze

to the recovery brought by the pills

Would take time

As change does

Despite the warning labels

His brain was too sick to warn him

Of the danger of mixing

anti-depressants and alcohol

If each makes you feel better by itself

Wouldn’t the combined forces change your life faster?

Yes

Intoxication wasn’t the only poison

In his system

As he grew up

experiencing only half of humanity

Preparing for a life of being

hard

strong

manly

Someone who could hold his whiskey

Constantly told that his stature should

Somehow dictate his personality

It groomed his to suffer silently

An illness he couldn’t see or understand

Eating at his sanity

Slowly warping his view of the world

and himself

He began seeing his loved ones from a distance

If they are so far away could they even hear him?

Yes

Without a sound

He finally got off the couch to take a shower

If he could convince himself to stay vertical long enough

to get clean

Then he could convince himself he wasn’t sick enough to

go to the hospital

Hospitals are expensive and his wife just had a baby

By trying to save his family the stress

of his illness

He made the last decision he would remember

Blackness crowded in on his shower tile

For a moment he thought he would have to change the bathroom light bulb

better him than his exhausted wife

One last sigh as the warm water bathed his back

and his knees buckled

His hand trailed down the wall until his elbow struck the side of the tub

Like his father and his father’s father

He spent his life fighting for his own way of life

But his enemies and battlefields

Were celebrated by the media

As what it is to be a man