Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts

2/14/24

THE SIZE AND SHAPE OF ALL THINGS ROLLING - Buddy Wakefield

By the time my fingernails had split
and cut their way back in 
toward the knuckle grit

I had already chewed these teeth
clear down to the dirty nubs
from chattering about how hard I hit bottom again

how far I had to climb up out of it
shovel myself off and start over
been doing that long as I can remember

as if it were my calling
as if my name were Helter Skelly
rising from falls I keep taking in vain

just for a reason to stand here, 
looking like another loose jawbone
hinged on a tilt-a-whirl. 

The question was, 

If god can do anything,
can he can make a rock so big
that even he can’t lift it? 

The answer is  

Yes, all he has to do
is commit
to defeating himself.

8/31/21

The Great Gulf - Richard Shelton

Between us and you there is a

great gulf fixed: so that they

which would pass from hence to you

cannot; neither can they pass to us,

that would come from thence.

                                     Luke 16:26

 

       1

 

At night when each dark shape in the desert

glows in the light of its own penumbra

I take the road by one white hand

and lead it to a deep arroyo, a dry wash

in which the river lives when it is home.

Stones remain where the water dropped them

and beneath them aged scorpions sleep

in small hotels with no view at all.

The sand is cool. I wonder if the river

will be here when I need to drown.

 

       2

 

We choose from what is available and fall

in love: anchorites with spiders, sailors

with each other; the bleeding foot

returns to embrace the shattered glass;

the overdose goes in search of an addict;

and those who are too much afraid

fall in love with their fear.

 

       3

 

I was broken by love but I was

so well repaired I can pass for anybody,

standing here where a river used to be.

In one hand my prayers, in the other the answers,

with a great gulf fixed between them.

 

To get here I dragged my shadow

over sharp stones and felt its cuts

and bruises. But the river was dry.

 

Oh Jesus Christ

and all my fingers losing their rings!

What will become of me when I offer

my soul to the Devil and he doesn’t

want it? What will I do

when there is no one left to betray?

7/26/19

Untitled - Unknown

When you finally forget her,
she’s standing in the kitchen.
She thinks it’s something in the water, and it is.
Her hands stop moving,
coming to a standstill in those rubber gloves
she seems to wear like armor.

And she looks out the window.
And she takes a breath, turns off the water
and goes to sleep.
And in the morning,
she wakes up
and makes you breakfast without a word.
Even when you break the plate.

Because you don’t remember the last time you were sober
and the lines between desperate and despise
start to blur come sunrise,
so you’re never awake to see it.
And it’s her fault, really.
After all these years she still can’t cook the eggs right,
still can’t shut up the baby.
Still can’t cover up bruises quite right
so it’s her fault when the questions come, really.
What were you supposed to do.

For her, it was a quiet affair,
she washed the dishes and made you dinner and
poured whiskey till her hands shook.
And she let you slip away.
Put the baby to bed and just let you slip away.
You’ll never forgive her for that.

But what about the kids.
They all say it, they all knew before either of you did.
But what about the kids, and all the time,
what about all that time,
and wouldn’t it just be better to stick it out.
Just hold on.
Just til Christmas and then we think about the broken glass
and the doors that don’t lock. Just wait til Christmas.

And what was she supposed to do.
Let the devil keep writing messages in the mirror?
Let the kids find out?
Let her traitorous hands burn the place down?
So she just pours you a whiskey.
And she waits til Christmas.

And the kids don’t find out.
And the house stays unburnt.
And she wears her rubber gloves like armor.
Like maybe you can’t touch her
if she’s washing the dishes.

And eventually you forget her.
She takes a breath.
And puts the baby to sleep.

And she lets you.

7/23/19

To Myself - Franz Wright

You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,
the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.
And I am with you.
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance
(in one of those rooms we are
living) and I am the rain

and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,
the nicotine crawling on your skin—
and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,
and if you vomit this time I will hold you:
everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.
It won’t always be like this.
I am going to buy you a sandwich.

7/22/19

Alcohol - Franz Wright

You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.

Can’t we.

The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.

Do you hear me.

You aren’t all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair . . .

I was always waiting, always here.

Know anyone else who can say that?

My advice to you is think of her for what she is: one
more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than
harm is not abject.”

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,

think of it.

I don’t have to be anywhere.

9/29/18

"I’m looking for something to scare me out of my skin" - Henry Rollins

I’m looking for something to scare me out of my skin
I’m following myself
Playing jokes on myself
Injecting myself with nightmares
I wait in dark corners to jump out and scare myself
I’ve got to get away from myself

9/25/18

THE MAN WHO NEVER LOSES HIS BALANCE - Stephen Dunn

He walks the high wire in his sleep.
The tent is blue, it is perpetual
afternoon. He is walking between
the open legs of his mother
and the grave. Always. The audience knows this
is out of their hands. The audience
is fathers whose kites are lost, children
who want to be terrified into joy.
He is so high above them, so capable
(with a single, calculated move)
of making them care for him
that he's sick of the risks
he never really takes.
The tent is blue. Outside is a world
that is blue. Inside him
a blueness that could crack
like china if he ever hit bottom.
Every performance, deep down,
he tries one real plunge
off to the side, where the net ends.
But it never ends.

4/17/18

The Witch's Story - Lawrence Raab

Everything you have heard about me
is true, or true enough.
You shouldn’t think
I’d change my story now.
A stubborn, willful little girl
comes sneaking
around my house, peering
in all the windows. She’s disobeyed
her parents, who knew
where the witch lived. “If you go,
you’re not our daughter any more.”
That’s what they told her. I have
my ways of knowing. All pale
and trembly then, she knocks at my door.
“Why are you so pale?”
I ask, although of course
I know that too.
She'd seen what she’d seen—
a green man on the stairs, and the other one,
the red one, and then the devil himself
with his head on fire, which was me,
the witch in her true ornament, as I
like to put it. Oh, she’d seen what she needed
to send her running home
but she walked right in, which is the part
I never understand completely. Maybe
she believed, just then,
that she was no one’s daughter any more,
and had to take her chances, poor thing,
inside with me. “So you’ve come
to brighten up my house,”
I said, and changed her into a log.
It was an easy trick, and gave me little pleasure.
But I’d been waiting all day.
I was cold, and even that
small fire was bright, and warm enough.

8/26/17

Healing Hermann Hesse - Buddy Wakefield

Hermann wants to eat nicotine sometimes. He asks
for a lot. He paces space to make himself nervous
because some people are better at surviving than
living. If you wanna get heavy he'll teach you. He
knows it. Spends his time falling from the weight.
Got a lead brain. It's a battle magnet. He carries it
around by the guilt straps. Don't laugh. You didn’t
see the size of the blizzard that birthed him. Fits
of snow. Cotton rocks. Whipped white bullet stretches
pinned with chips of teeth to his habit of crying for help.
He doesn't land well. Hates landing. It reminds him of not
living up.

Listen.
I know there were days you wanted to die.

Days you misplaced all the right words then waited
to make sense once everyone here stopped watching.

Nights you let them beat up your body in bed
because redemption was still alive in you howling.

Uncompromising.
Gathering strength.

Happiness
is too far to fall.

Felt like ecstasy
when they pounded it out of you.

Those days of dead weather high strung out together
and spoke for you.

You told everyone here it was a good life,
smiled and waved back into the wails of your wind fight,

into the parts of the past that haunt you,
all the days you weren’t being yourself.

It’s why most of the past
still haunts you,

Milk Worder,
Mr. Self Murder.

Hiding is not an option for people
so good at showing up. You show up.

It is okay that you showed up missing.
We’ve all abused ourselves

then looked over
the wrong shoulder about it.

Call it Fatherlock.
You were picked like this.

I know you hate the hope.
It’s all the hope that makes you stay.

And you stay so far off the ground.

Hermann will not bow down to gravity. Falling
he catches up to himself midair just before the ground
smacks. Pullthroat, they call’im. Sharp turner. Nothing
touches the ground here.  Ground is at capacity.
He sees that. He falls back. He patches parachutes
together with a kite knife.  It's big enough to raise him
in the updrafts where he hides himself away in angles
of air outlined by his knack for believing that this life
is gonna work itself out.

5/1/17

LETTER TO A LOST FRIEND - RICHARD SHELTON


War, trade, religious debts to discharge, these are mostly the reasons
for men’s distant journeyings: but you take pleasure in distant journeys
without reason.                                                               – St.-John Perse

we do not realize what we want
until we learn
what we are willing to give up for it
and you did God knows you did

when swimming was no longer possible
you learned to sink you learned
to live at the bottom of the sea

now tell me of the chambers where you sleep
tell me it does not matter
lie if you must

is your bed luminous is it festooned
with seaweed do all your narrow windows
open onto water
is the tide kind to you

forgive me if I do not understand

last night a stranger asked me what
gives you most pleasure and before I thought
I answered her revenge

4/30/17

PARTY - Andrea Gibson

I was 13 the first time
I drank so much the bugs stopped.

A high school party
at Chrissy Olden’s house,
a senior, whose mom worked overnights
at the truck stop and embarrassed the customers
by not being embarrassed to lose
a solid 10 minutes
rambling over the register
about who wrote what in her yearbook
in 1971.

I was sitting in the middle
of the living room
on a corduroy couch
telling Katie Mathews,
the only other 8th grader there,
something about the temperature of music.

Somewhere there was a DJ
holding his finger under the faucet
of the party.

Every few minutes
I’d be handed a bottle of something
that razored my tonsils all the way down.
If someone had told me
it was nail polish remover
I would have believed them
but I would not have stopped drinking
the red off of my heart.

Do you remember
the first time you knew you
were absolutely safe?

I stumbled into the bathroom
and locked the door behind me
so I could smile as wide as I had to
without anybody knowing I had to.

The mirror was caked with Aqua Net.
There was enough hair in the sink
to mistake the drain for a pet.

The last person who had vomited
in the toilet had missed the toilet.

A year prior, just before my grandfather
swallowed the worm of his life,
he leaned his yellow face into my terrified eyes
and made me promise to Never
go near the bottle.

Nobody had to tell me
that booze was a terrible way to die.

But this was a party,
and I was person for the very first time.

You won’t know what I mean
unless you’ve been there too.
The bugs drowned till morning.

Say what you want about addiction.
I pulled the hair out of the drain with my hands.

I took it home.
I gave it a name.

4/10/17

Bad Habits - Richard Shelton


how could I leave you behind
old friends
since I am going nowhere

here is good and there is evil
and again I fall like a drunk
between two stools

of all the things I have
I cherish most
what no one else would want

9/6/16

THE BOTTOM LINE - Richard Shelton

                                                       For William Stafford

You and I think about it: who pays
the price for the way we live?
Some people live so still
they incur no expenses. Others,
so wild there's the Devil to pay.
Some don't even know they're in debt
and others go slow to avoid it.

People like you pay as you go
and people like me live in debt,
but we know who we owe. I owe
a woman, a good woman, and I
will never be able to pay.

People like you are beautiful
and free of all debt. The best
that can be said for people like me
is that we know who we owe.

4/14/16

"To me, she's not even human, she's some kind of a germ." - Henry Rollins

To me, she’s not even human, she’s some kind of a germ. A concoc-
tion. She is neurotic, nasty and abusive. Pathetic is a word that
springs to mind. When she is loud and drunk, it’s torture being
around her. She treats marijuana like some life preserving drug. She
is most lively when she has a chance to get fucked up. Whenever
she’s spazzing out and drooling over pot, I think to myself, “coke
whore” but I change the word “coke” to pot. She doesn’t bathe much
and sometimes the stench can be quite noxious. I don’t like being
associated with her because I see how nasty she is with people who
I work with. When she comes into a room, I either leave or try to get
out of earshot of her. I hope she goes on her painful little way and
leaves my sight. Not a bone in me hates that girl. She has managed
to turn off everyone around her. She sure did it to me. I never set out
to feel like that, no way. Now it’s at the point where it’s totally
irreversible.

2/4/16

"I'm in the hot room again" - Henry Rollins

I'm in the hot room again
I am a time junkie
I am a user
Like all addicts, I come to the point where I ask myself
Who's using who
I take a look around and I see what I do
I look in the mirror and I see what it's doing to me

And I come to the conclusion that we got a pretty good thing going

1/13/16

"She's kind of druggie." - Henry Rollins

She's kind of druggie. On again off again. The times when she's on,
she's on. She's bumming on having to come down. When she's off,
she's talking about getting on. She's not an addict, it's an on again,
off again kind of thing. You know, like those “heroin weekends”
people go for, meth runs, etc. You know what I'm talking about. She
pulls an apple cart, the driver has a stick with an apple on a string,
he dangles it in front of her nose. She sees a syringe, the needle
shines. She likes the word “spike.” The needle is a lover, she likes
the words “doing a dime.” The needle is boss, the needle is her best
friend. If she says, “Tie me off, lover” one more time I'll scream.

12/10/15

Certain Choices - Richard Shelton

My friend, who was a heroin addict,
is dead and buried beneath trash
and broken bottles in a prison field.

He died, of course, because of the way
he lived. It wasn’t a very good way,
but it kept him alive. When it couldn’t
keep him alive any longer, it killed him.
Thoroughly and with great suffering.

After he had made certain choices,
there were no others available. That’s
the way it is with certain choices,
and we are faced with them so young.

I have few friends, and none of them
are replaceable. That’s the way it is
with friends. We make certain choices.