"Friends"

  My reflection in the bathroom mirror stares back at me with glassy bloodshot eyes. My jaw is covered with a coppery blonde stubble, the same color as my fathers. I'm wearing a thrift store button up shirt half way unbuttoned with a black wife beater under it. My jailhouse tattoos combined with the worn out dress shirt and unshaved face give me a distinct look of a man on the edge, like a man gone insane.

 I reach in the pocket of my shirt and dig out a cigarette, I light it and take a long slow drag before leisurely exhaling the smoke. My vices seem to me the closest thing to friends that i have ever known.

  Its funny that even to those I was friends with before I started hustlin again, that I am nothing more now then a guy they used to buy dope from. They couldnt be real with themselves and face their own addictions so instead they blame me.

 Looking back I know that was part of it, another part too is jealousy and resentment, I was the one with the hookup, who the girls all chased, the one with a fat stack of cash in his pocket.

 Pathetic really. Little punk ass haters.