for Karen, in memory;

I remember you still,
We were two searching souls lost in back one way streets.
I still shed tears
that I did not love you enough to tell you;
or perhaps,
I loved you too much.

I remember you still.
How you knew the streets intimately;
you walked them every night.

How we fought the world; and the world won.
I still live, you are gone.
Who knows why some are taken and others are left to linger on.
Determined by circumstance,
we chased star dusted nightmare;
that crystallized honey, Bolivian flake.
I have not forgotten you,
and how in? the end
it was your past that took you.

I remember you still,
I never said it then,
so I say it now these long tears ago,
I think of you now and then;
and how your heart was? scarred by others;
as the heart always is.
Perhaps it is not so much where we go,
that matters, so much,
but what we leave behind us,
in this mad dash into night.

I never said it then,
all those long years ago,
perhaps? I loved you too much,
I never told you,
you never knew,
so I say it now.

I remember you still,
and how on one night stands,
we searched madness together;
that sweet flake, pure and deceiving;
those one night flights into that blight.
I think of you some times;
how we chased midnight shadows,
and how our hearts touched if not our words.
In the end your past? killed you,
and not the syringe that was still in your arm,
when you were found,
huddled in that shop front..
We are all victims of victims, but some of us more so than others.
You had nowhere else to go.

I remember you still,
and our desperate flights
together chasing ecstasy,
looking for our? heaven as we explored hell.
Your desires just out of reach,
your dreams slipped through your fingers.
Fate turned in upon you.

Life gave you no second chance;
perhaps death will.