Tactical with your hands
the way you smooth my skin
beneath fingers so cool.
A promise held in your palm
where it blends away pain
into pressure and pleasure.
Your touch sifts away the world,
leaves me gasping in relief
that we are not alone.
Strummed beat, matched march, dirges as a throwaway tune,
deviancy is salt to bear rubbed tight inside a weeping open wound.
If you haven’t heard the music yet then swallow down your pride.
The life we lead is the life we get and you’ll know it deep inside.
So stagger or crawl and jog or sprint or fly,
the Devil is inside your soul today, just like it is for I.
I thought it would be a fun way to go today with a little poetry of sorts to begin with. This damn challenge thing has me trying to think on my feet about what to write and I seem to be coming up dry, or at least feeling like I’m grasping for straws about what to say. The goal was to just put fingers to keyboard everyday, and I’m happy to say that I’ve pretty much managed to do just that.
So, with that said, on my mind today is the nature of our own personal evils, our devils, our drive to do the untoward and vicious. For me, that takes the form of drinking or drugs, pumping my body full of as much poison as I can stand in whatever way I can get it. It’s always surprisingly shocking when after a bout in the ring with that particular demon suddenly the quality of life I’m experiencing diminishes rapidly and dramatically. I don’t know why it’s surprising is the thing, we truly do generate our own decisions, and those choices play out in the overall feeling of our life and how well we are able to experience the highs and the lows.
That seems like really common sense knowledge, and despite that I have sat remaining in, then feigning ignorance of it. Life truly is what you make it, trite and cliche as the saying may be, there is a huge degree of veracity to it that I somehow missed. It’s like I wasn’t there at school that day and somehow managed to keep missing that lesson for the next 20 years.
With that in mind, addiction is a doubly baffling fucking ailment to explore and endure. You find yourself superseding every survival instinct and rational or logical awareness you have in lieu of chasing further inclement weather, misery, and chagrin–all done for a momentary rush that has faded into boring monotonous repetition long, long ago.
I get that there is a re-wiring that happens internally with addicts. If you show an image of a crack pipe to a crack addict, before the frontal cortex is triggered the pleasure center rings in and says “great times to be had”. That means that addiction literally steps around the “smarts” part of the brain that makes decisions and can bring a logical or determined drive to bear on any dangerous ideas. Which in many ways makes it seem scientifically hopeless to recover.
But people do, in a myriad of ways. Some manage to just go the harm reduction route and drastically reduce their intake, or they transition it to new forms of addictive tendencies that are less damaging, or they actually well and truly get sober. The fact that there is a narrow band of success and the penalty for failure is horror without refrain followed by an early death doesn’t always make a sufficiently motivational case it seems.
Today, I continue the struggle, moving forward one foot at a time, continuing to believe and search for answers or solutions to something that has stymied me for the vast majority of my life. It is my heaviest wish to somehow overcome and share that success as a lesson to my children about what is truly possible as one of the strangest species on the planet.
People are weird, and when we carry monsters in our back pockets, we only get weirder. Part of me wants to just plain rejoice in that insanity and the multitude of characters that are created by the imps at our door, but most of me is just plain done reveling in a well trod and predictable path leading nowhere but an early grave.
Time will tell, as it always does. Plus hey, I still have getting poisoned by frog secretions to look forward to in a short number of weeks!
There’s a heinous wind of wanting that sheds lightly bound despair to the trundled carts of cash swept from their bodies.
Aching insides so very desperate, desiring the next and the next until the vacancy between their heart and soul is refined.
Never use the words “better than” when referring to your own, it makes you seem shallow in a wading pool of sharks and minnows.
What was the purpose? The sheer ecstasy of the reveal, the acquisition, the placement, the perfect moment of satisfaction felt so briefly?
What wiring madness has been mounted to the mainframe that this ceaseless task marks consumers as those to be consumed?
Eaten alive beneath wild stacks of treasure all aglitter in the pelting wind, eyes glazed to a rapture of earthly delights.
Obscenity cavern,
plastered with fucks,
gives rise to the new age
raised to bow low
keep your head down,
duck, tuck and roll.
Whispered in stories,
like the day it last rained,
awash is the removal
of freedom from failure,
honesty and blame.
Turncoats and bastards
(that’s what they cry)
mirrors twisted and cracking
impossibly contorting
as futility sighs.
At long last there is sense,
(though it echoes too loud)
in the canyons of absence
where each of the dead
is everlastingly proud.
I’ve found playful meaning
in the sharpest strands of daylight
while they bleached my night tan
into a wholesome red and brown.
been stripped clean of the unwholesome.
The rasping, the choking, the decaying
scent of another moon laced night
spent chasing dragons down the streets.
In the silver kissed necklace of shadows
that roll menacingly beneath the stars
as a slipshod grasp on tenuous reality
falls away, fast as a bat, never to be caught.
Crawled out dusty and beaten by self
into the unwelcome openness of daytime
Where people have jobs and families
go do things and have fun of their choosing.
There’s always a sick, nasty bitterness
surrounding the way I’d look at the crowds.
In those moments when shame carries
the day and bitterness over the injustice,
of wounds septic and worsening, a brain
melting beneath the heat of inquisition.
A Cadillac of contempt would sit, shining
In the corneas of each purple smudged eye.
Letting the self-loathing and concern go awry,
masking envy as hate and desire as disgust,
riding panic and fear out as arrogance and disdain.
Patronizing seconds as the world creaks,
moans its way out of the decadence of night,
quickens into the tittering joy of form alive.
There’s no surface to touch and manipulate
no interface that allows for a connection across
to that other world imbued with shiny smiles
and unbroken teeth not doing unspeakable acts.
In those moments when the sickness begins,
wafting out of your skin to notify and alert
anyone caring to notice of your diseased being,
your lesser than status, your unworthiness.
Those are the defining moments that show
the defying strength and fortitude you want,
when you have the opportunity tell the world
“get fucked, piss off, I make the next choice.”
or reaffirm the skepticism pandering to your
apathetic acceptance of what life has become.
Those are the moments when the shear grit
required to simply gut out the next series
of bad decisions, knowing how much it will hurt
but owning it, owning that the deeper down
you crawl the higher it will feel at baseline.
When you finally disconnect from the grime
Long enough to breathe untainted air
Purified in the radiance of sunbeams
And the wealth of happiness that soaks
Summer days beneath the blue painted sky,
there is a startling awareness, an epiphany,
a closure to doubt and a recognition,
that sobering up is just getting high in a new way.
Bang down the gauntlet
and fuck up the noise.
Realize the petulant cumwads
can’t find what life says are joys.
They’ll ratchet their wisdom
down your throat in a second,
betray all that you find worthy,
if you succomb and say fuck it.
Don’t drink from their frothy lips
filled with ignorant lies.
Tell them to get bent and rot
choke on their prevarications and die.
Stroll on through the incessant chatter
of normalized shit and conversational patter,
you’ll burn in bright hues that are special
though you be considered mad as The Hatter.
This prose of mine,
Uses wit to share,
A world all in rhyme.
From common to fantastic,
A one man show,
Cheerily quite tragic.
My thoughts Will Shake,
Romantic exaltation,
Bard your thirst I can slake.
Hear this soul vision,
Verses as a paintbrush,
Abstract mind without television.
I abdicate the final word,
Nod my head to a Lord,
Whose pen was mightier than a sword.
Plummet describes in a word the dumb shit,
The result of a life lived from one hit –
-to the next and that second of fuck it.
As intense wash the waves,
Through your secret filled caves,
Telling memories back from where you sent them away,
Until the shores are a littler cascade of broken mirrors pelting your gaze,
Each reflection a question,
Each flash a suggestion,
Of what happened and why,
Where you broke the faith and started to cry.
Each lens is a how of what could have been,
Who you are without all the sin.
No more pills and bottles and rock,
Bags of dope, sacks of coke and the inevitable cops.
Living on streets and the pity of strangers,
Acting devil may care to numb out the danger.
When each shot you took put a pin in your son,
Blocked his love just as well as you holding a gun.
You got loaded and loaded,
Raised finger and goaded,
As your legs washed out at the thighs,
From a tide on the rise.
If not for the merciful care,
From those you punish unfair,
You’d be sunk,
Drifting drunk,
Out to a personal sea in a trunk.
Boxed up tight when you ran out of fight,
Away from the world and your right,
As a man to do your best to make it alright.
And as long as it took,
For you to confess as a crook,
Thief of dreams, hopes and beliefs you forsook.
You can’t change the past,
It’s gone while the onrushing future hits fast.
So you accept the regret,
Live learn love and refuse to forget.
Keep strong in surrender,
Committed to change,
Because in the end you’re not alone,
And are any of us really so strange?
Snow blind hegemony awash in crystalline flakes,
Glittering razors culling our commoners and drunks with the shakes.
Loyalties cleaned and washed through censoring filters,
Amidst shapeshifters shifting to mask hands covered in blisters.
From the cold of their souls and the heat of their rage,
Seared meat not so young as to be tender with age.
The gallows of yore leave fractions aghast,
That here and now they have gone and the past is all past.
Passe the romance and notions of change,
Politics is riddled with absence,
Most notably shame.
P.S. This was written while watching the debates and final results during the Hilary vs Trump 2016 election. Was sitting in jail with a host of felons who were equally disgusted.
Sit powerfully with your eyes cast low,
Shouldering sugared pillars of duty,
That the sun can rest amid glorious delights,
And the travelers roam free across their paths,
Searching always for the journey-
-not the end.
To Ink - a blog from Melting Neurons 