addiction

MONDAY YEAR BY YEAR

The end of my week has arrived, but I am still battling the Monday blues.
It’s true what they say about loneliness, and how it can follow you, wearing your shoes.
I can’t seem to pick myself up when I’m down, and it’s dark in this tireless mind;
I long for direction, but my amputised purpose seems harder and harder to find.

I’m full with an emptiness and hungry for love but I’m drunk on a silent regret.
I’ve spiked my own drink and I drink to remember but I only forget to forget.
The cure I am missing is suddenly absent and only presents in my dreams;
I walk without frame for my burden is heavy and depression is bursting my seams

I’m sure that I’m noticed by people I pass but not one of them cares to converse.
If only they’d ask why I’m always alone, I would tell them I’m feeling my worst –
but I’d share that I’m patiently seeking intention, distraction, affection, and more,
although I’d not voice that I’m crying too much, and my self-love has gone out the door.

I’m poor in more ways that I care to admit, and bad habits have met me, revived –
my bank account dwindles from playing the slots but they numb me and keep me alive.
The scales are too honest, and I do not appreciate the numbers it flashes so cheaply:
it only declares what I fail to admit, but I continue the ritual weekly.

The fault is my own, and I own my mistakes, but, unwelcomed, they came without leaving.
The past has now gone but my present is filled with the memories I’m constantly grieving.
I did not expect to grow old in this life while still searching myself for more time;
it’s Monday forever for me, it appears, but at least I can say it is mine.

PUPPET

Here comes the addiction again, its
whispering lips disguised as passion, the
touch of its hidden hand tap-running
way beyond the weave of my skin
and I
soaked to my core, allow it to wed me:
these buckling knees and paper mâché vows
impressing the addict impaled inside, and
while it listens
eyes necking everything in raised pulse,
it rolls them back with slack-jawed possession
and I move aside
host to a beaten heart that will not commit to stopping
– a puppeteer’d shell in this limbless silence –
running far without a single step
both of us
gambling with a satisfied purr that only I
once combative
now frail
know as loneliness

THE RIDE

Faced again with options,
– I am –
thumb sore,
from hitching a ride
to any direction
I’m taken:
partial nudity
framing the high risk
beneath these threads –
allowing nothing
but neglect
to course through these veins,
closer than a man’s knife.

Nothing but dis-ease
can stain like old graffiti:
stubborn and unwelcome,
and impossible to wash away.

It beckons to take my life
– this weed that chokes me –
but I know better than that:
it’s already gone.
What little of me remains
is always outside searching.

– red lights –

– red eyes –

– bloodied hope –

So I’ll take their word
– these men who stop to ogle –
and their banter,
and I’ll take the seat they offer
while I push their oily hands away,
just to sink back
for a moment
into the stubborn stench
of leathered history –
into the cosy
but broken seats
of the ride I’m taking now
– not the ride of my life,
but the pick-up
to another stop.

And as I sleep with eyes wide
and ears open
I search within

for freedom and peace

– an end to it all –

But it’s their cigarettes and coffee
that keep me breathing.