ADDICTION
 
There was a time
Deep in the long ago
When I could love
With the purity of a child,
But I remember
That I always felt undeserving
Of the love returned.
Those were the days
When love was the prey
And I, the stealthful hunter
Always stalking, always stalking,
Like the bottle had always stalked me
In the rusty days before the pills
And coke, and chiva
Made the pain go away.
It was like trying to live without air.
No, no- -it was something more than that.
It wasn’t so brief as that,
As just turning blue and dying,
It was lifelong and drug-out;
I was the moth
And addiction was the flame
And like the lowly moth
I had no choice, but to chase the flame.
It has been surmised by someone, somewhere
That perfection hampers success,
That desperation is the art of paralysis
And that addiction exists
Simply to make the hurt go away.
Now I spend all my time
Teaching the dying inside me
To coexist with me again.
Observe the dread here,
As I am hunched over my computer
Clicking the keys as fast as I can,
Like some kind of street junkie,
And my high, my salvation
Are the little words that appear
On the silver screen in front of me.
I think loneliness is not so much
A function of solitude
As solitude is a product of loneliness,
But it comes slowly, and quiet at first,
Like the sound of steam rising
Above the rim of my coffee cup.
It’s a waiting game you see,
The destruction of self,
But it was the sound of that destruction
That made me feel alive.
 
uTAH jAY