We Tried And We Died By: Jack McCarthy

We died of pneumonia in furnished rooms
where they found us three days later,
when somebody complained about the smell.

We died against bridge abutments
and nobody knew if it was suicide
and we probably didn’t know either
except in the sense that it was always suicide.

We died with our stomachs huge and distended.
There was nothing they could do.

We died in cells,
never knowing whether we were guilty or not.

We went to priests.
They gave us pledges.
They told us to pray.
They told us to go and sin no more,
but go.

We tried and we died.

We died of overdoses.
We died in bed (but usually not the Big Bed).

We died in straitjackets in the DT’s
seeing God knows what, creeping, skittering, slithering, shuffling
things.

And you know what the worst thing was’
The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.

We went to doctors
and they gave us stuff to take that would make us sick when we drank,
on the principle of so crazy, it just might work.
Or maybe they just shook their heads and sent us to places like
Drop-kick Murphy’s.
And when we got out we were hooked on paraldehyde.
Or maybe we lied to the doctors,
and they told us not to drink so much,
" just drink like me."

And we tried and we died.

We drowned in our own vomit or choked on it,
our broken jaws wired shut.

We died playing Russian roulette
and people thought we’d lost but we knew better.

We died under the hoofs of horses,
under the wheels of vehicles,
under the knives and boot heels of our brother drunks.

We died in shame.

And you know what was even worse’
Was that we couldn’t believe it ourselves,
that we had tried.
We figured we just thought we tried
and we died believing that we hadn’t tried,
believing that we didn’t know what it meant to try.

When we were desperate enough to go for help...
we went to people with letters after their names
and prayed that they might have read the right books,
that had the right words in them.
Never suspecting the terrifying truth...
that the right words,
as simple as they were,
had not been written yet.

We died falling off girders on high buildings,
because, of course ironworkers drink,
of course they do.

We died with a shotgun in our mouth,
or jumping off a bridge,
and everybody knew it WAS suicide.

We died under the Southeast Expressway with our hands tied behind us
and a bullet in the back of our head,
because this time the people that we disappointed,
were the wrong people.

We died in convulsions,
or of ‘insult to the brain’,
we died incontinent,
and in disgrace,
abandoned.

If we were women,
we died degraded,
because women have so much more to live up to.

We tried and we died
and nobody cried.

And the very worst thing was that for every one of us that died
there were another hundred of us,
or another thousand who wished that we could die,
who went to sleep praying we would not have to wake up
because what we were enduring was intolerable
and we knew in our hearts it wasn’t ever gonna change.

One day,
in a hospital room,
in New York City,
one of us had what the books call,
a transforming spiritual experience,
and he said to himself,
‘I’ve got it’
(no, you haven’t,
you’ve only got part of it)
and I have to share it
(now you’ve ALMOST got it),
and he kept trying to give it away.
But we couldn’t hear it.

We tried and we died.

We died of one last cigarette,
the comfort of its glowing in the dark.
We passed out and the bed caught fire.
They said we suffocated before our body burned.
They said we never felt a thing:
that was the best way maybe that we died
except... sometimes we took our family with us.

And the man in New York was so sure he had it.
The man in New York tried to love us into sobriety
but that didn’t work either.
Love confuses drunks
And he tried, and we still died.

One after another we got his hopes up,
and we broke his heart because that’s what we do.

And the worst thing was that every time we thought we knew what the
worst
thing was something else happened that was worse.

Until a day came,
in a hotel lobby,
and it wasn’t Rome,
or Jerusalem,
or Mecca
or even Dublin,
or South Boston
it was in Akron Ohio, for Christ’s sake.

A day came when the man from New York said,
I have to find a drunk because I need him as much as he needs me
(NOW you’ve got it),

And the transmission line after all those years, was open.

And now we don’t go to priests
and we don’t go to doctors and people with letters after their names.
We come to people who have been there.
We come to each other and we try,

and we don’t have to die.
Tweet