"Rikki's Requiem"

                                            Alone with a vacant soul and a perilous heart: I resided wearily, in a dim-lit one-room basement efficiency on the downtown outskirt. A friend practicing a Christian ministry attempted  guiding me toward radiant daylight, through active worship and daily abstinence. A flat suburban highway stretched invulnerably before spectating motorists; consciously dead at their steering wheels, between coffee gas-station intervals. Tedious workdays being a lifestyle necessity for me during that time; how else can a junky feed his insidious obsession? 
                                            Rikki lived a few blocks toward the heart of this factory town and its weekday traffic. She possessed a petite body frame with small slender shoulders; strawberry-blonde hair with dark highlighted bangs. Her gray-hazel eyes were often shaded in black mascara overtones. Rikki lived directly behind the Main st. nail salon. While malicious evenings of tedious reckoning were at hand; we interacted efficiently through stale moonlit corridors and drunken pavement pilgrimages.  Chemical endurance fluctuated through a season's nostalgic cycle. Amid late-Halloween ornament alignment; Row-home residences adorned in precocious maple seasoning: pumpkin-porches along wooded stoops of auburn. A late-autumn recluse returned home upon a gravel driveway parking-lot; leading to a rotted lower-class apartment building, An unmaintained tractor rested idly outside my cellar window.
                                             Dear Rikki, a meticulous feline swindle merchant of dry and deadly goods. Her sinful, reposed life remained indifferent; to the far desolate cries of plagued remote wildernesses.
                                            Rikki's body now rests between brown-gold burial leaf-piles; a gray-grain tombstone eternity amid haystack needle cemeteries. Deceitful and syringe-full; blood-red q-tip acquaintances: pale narrow wrists of cellulite abscesses. A guaranteed cure manifested nightly, by stupefied heavens of unconscious sorrow. St. Peter in all of his acclaimed glory could never of predicted such unnecessary heartache, nor abrupt departure. Dear Rikki angelic valedictorian on high, in an earth tone corduroy jacket, ripped denim jeans while commencing local barroom upheavals. Midnight recklessness and diseased drunken mayhem shrouded her tumultuous days. Nocturnal cloud shapes grimly oscillated through black omnipresent horizons.
                                           Anxiety-ridden, dear Rikki pleaded in foxhole prayer. Coming out of 5th. St. woodwork havens with artificial Sunday piety. Quaint afternoon streets temporarily humbled her involute quest of endless desire; among the wind-swept dooryards.
                                        Prescription sleeping pills never sufficed her psyche with rest nor contentment. Her morning obituary bled ink-red hues through the Daily News. We already read the headline while she slept in her apartment bedroom; behind the nail salon; where her front door opened out onto backward alleyways of intermittent torture. To think, was to be enslaved to dear Rikki. Rehab forenoons in stone sober-settings; as institutionalized as I was during that time; tomorrow became a rapacious fear to her that yesterday could hardly handle.
                                          A fatal progression took Rikki's frail life not long ago; amidst her daily evening travels to Kensington and back. If not one thing; then perhaps another. A plagued orphan toward dissolute wreckage.  Rikki perished, morbidly misplaced among her familiar so-called friends.