addiction

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

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.