Showing posts with label substance abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label substance abuse. Show all posts

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

9/11/18

"I was at this guy's house." - Henry Rollins

I was at this guy’s house. I met this girl who was hanging out
there. She was real pretty, she had brown eyes and dark hair. She
was soft-spoken and real nice. I know that everyone has their
own life and they can do what they want and you shouldn’t think
anything of it or anything. But man, I couldn’t help but flinch a
little when I saw all those needle marks in her arm, they looked
so sore. Hateful little holes. I wanted to say something, but I
didn’t.

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.

5/3/17

Five of Swords, for all my death girls - Marty McConnell

Betsy’s in the second stall practicing
with a plastic razor, so I lie on the floor
to listen for the janitor, the cart’s

loose wheel squeaking our names down
the evening-empty hallway. the weeks
she was at Lutheran General, I didn’t

go to visit. but I know from her stories
what the doors looked like, closing,
how they strapped her to the bed
for her own protection. we’re 17

and I adore her despair. I think she’s shining,
fearless, carving herself a body that’s nothing
but light. on the way home, she lets me
drive. tells me there’s a trick

to disintegrating in increments subtle enough
not to trip the alarm wires, to hiding cigarettes
and death from therapists and parents and this,

all my girls have had down: how to go and go
until the night is too fragile or grimy
and then the fanfare, the wild dive

from the spire, the water tower, the clock
yanking its hands back, how to dangle
from the spotlight once everybody’s
watching. 1999: we lie on Angie’s futon

searching the phonebook for institutions
that will take her without insurance, curl
our bodies into still commas of want
to wait for morning. they take

her shoelaces, and her cigarettes, and I watch.
they give her forms and more forms
and I watch. they walk her to the room

with its single bed and single dresser
and unsmashable mirror and I ride
the long, high buzz of the door back

to New York. 2003: Georgiana is an expert
in suicide and poetry. her medicine cabinet rattles
like a jar of vengeful bees. she wants me
to find her. all our idols are martyrs, not one of them

a saint. her hair drops like cabernet all the way
to her waist. and how she needs me. my simple body
becomes bread in her mouth, I’m whiskey,
an obliteration who’ll get up in the morning

to call the hospital and make coffee. oh,
my pretty ones in love with the beast
of disappearing, there are many ways

to give birth. not one is without pain.
there are almost as many ways to die
as there are to love. tonight, I drink to you

who chose to keep going, who moved
through my body like a chemical
I could not keep. the night stands outside
like a hungry dog on an old chain, the scent

of lilies rising from the half moons of his teeth.
go ahead. tuck your babies into bed
and lovers’ hair behind their soft ears, as if
there’s nothing left to fear.

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

11/22/16

TODAY MY ALARM WENT OFF AT 12:30PM - Mira Gonzalez


I stayed in bed for over an hour
looked at things on my phone
I felt slightly anxious about nothing particular
I walked downstairs and poured coffee into a jar
I asked a person on the internet if I should take drugs
I took drugs before the person had time to respond

I feel alienated by people who express concern about me without
defining their concern in terms of a specific solution or goal
I dont feel comforted by the idea of an afterlife
I dont want to continue experiencing things after I die
I want someone to pull my hair because I like the idea of someone
controlling my head without touching my head

what is the difference between being an independent person
and being a person who is accepting of loneliness

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.