WHEN HOPE TURNED TO DOPE

My memories of yesterday are hazy at best
Perhaps they’ve faded away at retribution’s request
Yet somehow I remember popcorn and pop-guns as a child
And then came seventeen when I discovered poppy plants grow wild

My adolescent days are difficult to recall
I hardly remember too many of them at all
But with great difficulty I found a way to cope
For then came seventeen when I discovered dope

I remember she and me holed up in a seedy hotel
It wasn’t but should have been dubbed “Hotel Hell’
Because that’s where the shadows of its hallways had finally led
While I was shooting up on the floor and she upon the bed

In the land of the rising sun is from where the powder came
And there was no one except she and I to blame
Somehow slanted eyes knew precisely what to do
And how to make heroin from the poppies they all grew

We’d checked into that hotel with empty luggage in tow
We left them behind so the clerk never knew when we’d go
We ran up a charge for room service to order up some food
But the dope we had injected mitigated hunger’s mood

Seventeen is now coming upon seventy too fast
And ever fades the remembrances of a very shady past
They are mostly visions my mind commands me not to save
However before I turned twenty I was visiting six very good friend’s grave
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