Addiction and Angst go with Zero and Zapped: A to Z

Becoming a high-voltage journey through love’s urgency

Connecting a daughter a lawsuit some roadblocks that vex

Delivering pain then relief from the opposite sex. W

E watch as the narrating damsel’s distressed  POV

Fast-forwards to new love and new need; in her you see you

Get tangled as drug use holds daughter as hostage and yet

Hope’s there, always peeking and promising no more regrets

In dealing with grief and pursuit of joy, grieving pursuer

Just skin-of-teeth holds it together, and not PDQ

Knapsacking her grief for a time to get comfort and sleep

Lift, calibrate–back to the fray–fraidy-cats, welcome in–O

May Heaven have mercy and Luminousness ever limn.

***”

Afterword: My superbly talented poet friend Susan Vespoli sent me a copy of her new book Therefore, Illuminated. It is a continuation of One of Them was Mine, which told in voltaic verse of her unhoused, struggling son’s last few hours of life, and his death by handgun by a (now former) police officer who was later judged to be acting “out of policy.” We learn of the trial and grueling machinations that follow Vespoli’s wrongful death suit; of her daughter in the grip of drugs and depression, who paradoxically views being unhoused and drugged-up as “freedom” and has Vespoli walk a tightrope of helping without enabling; of a search through eHarmony for connection, and finding such with a tall, thin man who gives her, and her journey, much-needed relief and joy; and finally the coinciding of the delivery of the wrongful-death settlement check with a solar eclipse, as if the Universe was writing a poem of its own with a punchline of stunning metaphor.

Friends, I hope you will find Ms. Vespoli’s book on Amazon or via Kelsey Books, her publisher. It tells her compelling journey with brilliant verse, with some in the Abecedarian form as I used above with less grace than she wields.