Addict

I am so old and live in such a place.
Daily, I perform rituals –
That is, habits repeated to get necessaries.
I tell myself they are beautiful
Even though I hate everything I have become.

I sleep away the days in the hope of not awaking.
And in the icy arms of mistress void, I dream impossible fragments –
Colours, sounds – an amalgam of insanities
Which, I tell myself, might one day enable me to beat the machine.
Yet every day I awaken to the same four walls
and the ashes of a possible escape scatter
like rabbits before the teeth of a combine as the cramps hit me,
and once again, I have to acknowledge what I have become.

Now I am desperate and hate everyplace.
The urge owns me as white men once owned slaves,
And when I pass faces on the grey streets, I avert my eyes
- quicken my stride.
Apace, lurching like a pissed ship upon waves only I can see.

I would cry, but I have lost the ability because I have lost the reason.
I would cut my own throat but it would take too long
And besides, all there is the beat of the machine –
the habit of the habit – feed-fade-repeat
the addicts cycle song.

And now I go through a time-honoured performance.
I call mobile numbers penned down on the back of a pack of smokes,
Ask the question – U Got?
Await now their arrival, skulking under an overpass or down by some empty warehouse, shadow dwelling like a beaten dog.
And I while away each jabbing second amid the detritus of society – flotsam, graffiti –
underclass under the underpass.
Stood in ashen repose as the smashed out windows stare at me like the frozen eyes of some long dead sentient monolith.

And when at last they arrive,
I hand over money, which I have come by in such shameful ways,
And the worst of it is that I don’t even care.
Yet sometimes, I trick myself into thinking it’s all justified anyway,
That the world is wrong – not me.
Some days I put on a mask or two, elevate myself to the mythical state of appearing useful
So that the tiny child inside me doesn’t die off altogether.
Yet each endless monocentric day, this seems more and more pointless
And I wonder how long it will be before I disown myself completely.

Each step back to what passes as accommodation, the craving grows,
like a perversion as my body defies my mind, sweet beading, uniting in runnels that wend from forehead to the salty recognition of lips chapped and cracked like scrunched glass.
The child inside is so very sorry I ever got into this – though his adult shell cares not beyond persuading fingers palsied with angst, to coordinate the once simple act of getting a key into a lock.

IN.

Cut a path through the discards – pizza boxes, cans whose last remains bled away to a host of pooling stains a life ago. Gathers of abandoned clothes clumped as if it were discarded skin sloughed off in amorphous gathers of memorial fabric.
Alight upon the sofa, whose only decorative features are an array of burn marks and the still redolent remains of kecked on vomit.

Minutes crescendo into an inching throb – the pulse of the machine
And I scream as i almost drop the spoon.
Search round for a fresh needle and, unable to find one
rip the top off the pin-bin. And pull out the first one I come across
(Junkie-Jack) even though others have been here,
Even though I promised myself never to use
A
Dirty
Needle.