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 Welcome to My life in the shadows

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 https://PoetryPoem.com/mypoems20449

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ABOUT: This is an adventure of poetry and prose, a biography of sorts. I am so happy to be here. Please come and join me if you will as I am hoping for feedback before I publish. FORWARD I am a recovering business owner, writer, addict, alcoholic, and junkie who spent 47 years of my life in the bane of my sickness, my disease, because I had convinced myself that there was no way out. I had finally come to that fine point in my malady where I truly believed that the only way out of heroin addiction was to take a hit so big and so mighty that it would end it all pain, and I was alright with that. What I mean to say is that death was alright with me. I was so tired of the game that I had become dead inside. Now I am ten years clean and sober. When I was eleven years old I was molested by a scout master who had befriended me. He would take us inner-city boys swimming, inner-tubing down local streams and rivers. He would take us camping and fishing. He owned apartments and rent-a-shops all over the city and when one became vacant he got us boys together to help clean up what mess was left and get it ready to rent and for that we got a sleep over. I remember the last time I saw Marv. I remember how peculiar I felt inside when I learned I was the only one invited that night. It was always a full house at Marv’s slumber parties I thought. In 1961 America child abuse and molestations were never talked about openly on the nightly news, nor in the news papers. It was a taboo subject then, something that lay hidden away in darkness, something that was never mentioned by descent folk, which left no one to talk to, no one to say “it’s not your fault” “ it’s okay” “ your home and safe now” “I love you”, nowhere to turn. I started drinking when I was 12 years old. By the time high school rolled around I was an alcoholic. I remember getting high on pot for the first time and how ecstatic I was when I realized I didn’t need to go to school with a hangover anymore. Soon I became so unruly that my Father would send me away for the summers in an effort to keep me out of trouble. The first summer it was to my sister’s house in Las Vegas, who had kids my age and where I got into just as much trouble as I did at home, well almost. The next three summers were spent on my Brother-in-Law’s ranch in south-central Utah, at the time he was an alcoholic. I remember draining drops of whiskey from his pile of empty Wild Turkey bottles out by the trash heap. When I was seven-teen I joined the United States Marine Corps. In the Corps I spent one of my four years on Okinawa, an island in the South China Sea off the southern tip of Japan where I became romantically involved with a island girl who passed away in the back seat of a taxi cab trying to give birth to our child, I was ten-thousand miles away from anyone who cared. I truly believe that addicts are made and not born. I know this in my heart. Nobody ever dreams of becoming an addict, it is just a way of evading the pain inside and once learned it is never forgotten. This is the story of how this addict was made and saved. I tell it in the sincere hope that it might be of some use to someone who is out there right now and needs help right now. Someone who thinks they are trapped, lost within the grips of their sickness. Some who believes the lie they have told themselves over and over again, like I used to do, that there is no way out…But there is, and I found it, or rather, it found me. uTAH jAY

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