My Days with an Opium - eater

My Days with an Opium - eater.

I thought I was safe in our serene Sunflower Summers.But you soon found stronger seasons could replace me.Yes you still cared - through an ochre - opium haze,which seemed to expunge demons I never knew existed.Your caresses of me with your eyes shuttered opened mine.

I had read Burroughs, De Quincy, and knew all the words to all the thrillingly hip and decadent songs of the Velvet Underground.Scrutinising Edie Sedgwick’s factory life way before Sienna Miller.
Hearing your friends talking in low, slow voices. So I knew. I tried flushing you out. Throwing the stuff out to sea. Pleading with you.

All for nothingness rinsed out by your blood. It left us with such scar tissue, purple ropes of it that we could not untangle.Your needle strewn daze. Drop upon drop of citric acid.
Burning our sunflower past in a heated spoon. Acrid can never be tender.My stomach churned as my senses dimmed. I realised Icould not be a moth to your flame.

Breaking through trashing waves of brown - gold fluid, I found me again. Then there was him.
I looked into his clear, hazel eyes, flecked with a beauty I hadn’t recognised before. My brick - dust heart melted molten.Then your quick - sand smile faded. The docile, never - asking questions me threatened to desert our garden.

By now thorns and nettles had made it impenetrable.
You had been too obsessed by poppy seeds to prune and reap.You pretended to come clean. Said you would reform. Those same
old promises. Guilty for leaving you - I tried a final shot of your future in your arm. Lifeless. You had become a desert with no oasis in sight.
Not in my lifetime. Only caramel - camel tracks there. No healing fluids.

You had grown too sulphuric in your quagmire, too swampy to infiltrate.My soil is now fecund Spring with daffodils and his sweet herb garden.
But sometimes I still wonder why you didn’t throw away your syringe.