Michael Lee
This morning I awoke clutching your name with such reckless devotion that it turned to dust each letter fell to the floor.
I know where you went,
long before you vanished,
long before the grave.
You sank into your body like a river,
guided by the low light burning on the horizon.
I know how you found us:
the pipe is a beacon.
The pipe is a lighthouse.
You wanted to know how to remove the emptiness from yourself.
We never understood it cannot be removed.
It is not a pulsing seed in the gut,
or a peach pit run into the mud.
We weren't drug addicts,
we said we were scientists.
We experimented each day.
Sent the smoke down into the deep mine of the chest,
as though it were a rope with a hook at the end,
to pull the emptiness back out.
We partitioned ourselves away to the dark,
piece by piece.
We did not remove the emptiness,
but further became it.
The mind of the addict is cunning enough to convince the body it is not dying.
Houdini doesn't have shit on an addict,
he was able to convince everyone but himself he had vanished.
Addiction is the ethereal art of forgetting that you are still here.
I know where you went,
before the syringe perched in your arm
and whistled through the vein,
like a steam engine.
Before the crack rock broke apart in a blaze of light,
as though it were an egg hatching fire.
I know what it is to walk down an unlit street at midnight and have a gun cocked in your mouth.
I know what it is to discover the gun shaking in your own hand.
The most dangerous neighborhood is the one in my own head.
This is a game of masks.
A Rorschach test of the mind.
QUESTION: what do you see?
Anything I want.
This is the magic of perception.
The difference between an addict and one who is drowning,
is the one who is drowning knows it.
The addict will drink the sea until it becomes him.
Even now, five years sober,
when I smell whiskey from across the room,
my mouth still waters.
I have not fed my skin a blade for nearly a decade,
for fear of what I might let out.
What sleeps must one day wake,
even when you sneak through your own life like a thief.
I having spent whole nights lying awake.
Asking why I made it and you didn't.
I can still hear death pawing at the outskirts of town,
as you vanished inside the needle in your arm,
and I swayed from the edge of a bridge.
Neither one of us was any more deserving of this life.
I feel ill to even think it,
But I have to thank you,
some days,
Your death is all that stands
between me and a drink.
There were days I went as far as to hold a bottle in my hand,
but couldn't bring myself to swallow,
because your name was stuck in my throat.
There were weeks I couldn't walk two blocks
from my door without being asked if I wanted
some kush,
some glass,
some white,
some snow,
some jack up,
some jelly beans,
some dust,
some rock,
some good shit.
And each time I heard your voice ask me,
"How badly do you want this life? You didn't deserve it then, but you got it. So what are you willing to do to keep it?"
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This poem really speaks to me as someone who has had to fight addiction. The piece "I can still hear death pawing at the outskirts of town, as you vanished inside the needle in your arm, and I swayed from the edge of a bridge. Neither one of us was any more deserving of this life." really hit me. Some days my skin itches for needles. Seven months.
