A SNAP-SHOT OF JOANNA
 
She wasn’t fussy about what
drugs she used or how she took
them; injected, sniffed, smoked
or swallowed, it didn’t mean
a thing to Joanna,
she had a big heart and was
perhaps overly generous and
this was rarely to her
advantage; once she told me
that one time she was on
her way to her dealer for
an early morning cocktail
when she was stopped by
an unkempt and disheveled
old lady who told her that
she had no money or food
or electric; Joanna opened up
her purse and gave the old
lady her drugs money;
she would frequently prostitute
 herself to quench her chemical
 appetite  and a few years
back she barely survived a
frenzied knife-attack by a
deranged speeding stranger
in a derelict squat and I’d see
Joanna, laying sprawled,
passed-out in the street; her
skimpy clothing revealing
her tortured body and I’d
think of her 2 children who
have never known her and of
her silent parents that lived
in another country;
Joanna had no friends that
she could rely on, no one to
turn to for comfort, for love
or for whatever she felt she
was missing and looking
for and she died at the weekend
of a heart-attack, she was just
days away from her 34th
birthday and she will be all too
quickly forgotten in a world
that revolves around the
pursuit of narcotics; in a
world of searching or seeking
for something that would
ease the pain and banish the
awful darkness of the heart
that you
and I could never understand
no matter how hard we tried
to understand
we couldn’t,
and it’ll beat me
just as it did you,
Joanna.

John D Robinson