the market

"easy money"
searching lost souls
for opportunity
selling stolen time -
tomorrow's happiness

killers, 
born out of convenience
teething on shattered lives
gnawing on tethers
which hold another's future

​because keeping poison flowing through veins,
making another's death easier,
is more financially relevant
than speaking into the brokenness
they enable.

addicts would persistently seek their fix
without catering
but perhaps fewer
- without 
the dealers trafficking their way to money
on a road paved in festering bodies
they didn't bother trying to save.

prison may come to some, on both sides,
but change will only grow
out of a true desire 
to be better.

every life is worth saving,
even the lives 
of those who sell poison
and kill beautiful souls.

when a nice person stands 
on both sides of the poison,
still nobody wins.

traffickers.
bystanders.
dealers.
enablers.
addicts.
death.

no crime is victimless.

but who 
will be the courageous person
to stop the cycle 
of destruction?

the dealers keep on living,
their filthy money earned 
with meager effort
to finance someone else's 
eventual death -
they sit at their fancy televisions
while a brother claims the remnants
of a sister's life
because the poison 
took her 
Away.
leaving shattered memories 
in her wake.

yet, 
coma doesn't come to the sellers
of the poison that killed her,
they are free.

are they remorseful?
would they stop?

over a year later, 
they are still selling.

this is what they did 
with their stolen freedom, 
after she died,
- they continue killing others.

even if they all end up in prison,
she is still dead.

even if they care what they are doing 
is wrong
and stop,
she is still dead.

shame comes in small boxes,
at first,
which, 
gathered up,
become a maelstrom.

lost in a tangled web woven 
by complexities of addiction, 
variances of will-power,
no easy answers or solutions.

a killer,
buying, selling,
stolen time -
the very cost is life itself
"easy money"
playing the market game.

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related piece: "more financially relevant"

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