Stealing from family and acquaintances

here come the heroin kids—
just out of high school

bringing the best merchandise to sell:

Victoriana, gold jewelry,
original carded Star Wars figures

but I reluctantly have to pass on the Tiffany lamp
because it’s probably intimately photographed

with a separate insurance rider.

Sometimes the addicted young women

show up with nothing to sell
except their mouths
which I also pass on

because they guys have mentioned
more than once
that the girls are all HIV positive

from the rich Iranian dude who owns the trailer park.

Twenty years later
I sometimes wonder about those poor tortured souls
having seen the faces of addiction in so many forms.

Like an overburdened simian,
I’m compelled to climb a ladder to my attic
once a month

to light up a shade
of hand painted blacked-eyed susans
on mosaic glass

which I finally just had to buy
from a gaunt young woman for two hundred bucks.

I should have passed on the hand job
but she threw that in for free.