ADDICTION IS LIKE LUST
Addiction is like lust
is like a bank is like a drug
is like a life of your own
you’ve got to keep on taking
because the symptoms of withdrawal
are more catastrophic
than the risks of overdosing.
And we’re all hooked on the planet
like a big rock we’re trying to break down
like blasting caps in a crystal skull
we found buried in the light
like the motherlode of all bad needles.
We want to do five rocks tonight
and save three for tomorrow
we can sell in the morning
to begin again
the beginningless end of everything.
And don’t say it’s
just a lack of conviction
because the truth of the matter is
we’re fanatically addicted to addiction.
Addiction is what gives our lives
mass and gravity;
if it weren’t for addiction
we wouldn’t know which end is up
we wouldn’t be able to point ourselves out at night
to the blind child within us
like the trackmarks
of a new constellation
shining out for everyone to see
our likeness in a braille of blackholes.
And it doesn’t really matter
what you’re addicted to,
money, art, sex, power, cruelty,
your own abject licentiousness
born of being bored with death,
religion, enlightenment,
the desparate goodness of everything,
the mystic exotica of your own mind
dogpaddling in the abyss
with nebulae and jellyfish,
or even deeper than Freud, the void
that swallows the mind whole;
addiction is the dream that wakes you up
like the lips of a black rose
on the forehead of the moon
just as your skull is going into full eclipse.
Addiction is an art. Is a discipline
that would shrink the rigour of armies
by contrast with the demonic ferocity
of its artificial will to live on death
as if the next door you open like an eyelid
were already the coffin of your last breath.
Addiction doesn’t drink
from the sacred wells
on the holy mountainsides
voicing their prophecies like pythons.
Addiction looks for muses
like dangerous night-mirages
in a desert of inspiration
the wind blows away
like hydrogen ghosts
in a graveyard of stars.
Addiction drinks its own tears
like small drops of glass
it’s purified
from a shoreless sea of quicksand
where every grain
is the tiny cornerstone
of a pearl of a world
that couldn’t stand up on its own.
Addiction is a mode of devotion,
a faithful tide
in the unfaithful ocean
of everything that people feel they’re missing
when they’re washed up on the moon
like a lifeboat with no one to save.
Addiction is a thirsty fish
trying to breathe stars
through the gills of it shadows
like light through the nets of its scars
without getting caught.
You might be addicted
to your own reflection
like a bird to the eyes
of an undulant snake
making you dance like a flute
to your own music,
but it’s as impossible
to be addicted to who your are
as it is for water to drown a wax museum
because addiction is born
in the empty mangers
of who you are not
and sustains itself like solitude
on nothing.
(Black angels like the white
prefer the light to solid food.)
Addiction is the rush of the Second Coming
trying to save enough kick
to sprint to the finish line
past the first Apocalypse
on anabolic steroids
even when it knows the race is fixed
by the last flag of blood in the fit
to fly at half-mast
even before you’ve made an end of it.
Addiction shoots time
like a mirror
in a dealer’s bathroom
that’s just washed off your face
like a fingerpint on space
that doesn’t belong to anyone
whose last known address
was a loveletter
returned to the sender
like a threshold of homeless snakes.
For those who are falling
addiction blossoms like a parachute
that inflates time into eternity
so that every moment sways Icarus
at the first toke
like a club-footed pendulum
dancing with chandelier Cinderellas
who never die like candles
at the stroke of midnight
for flying too close to the light.
And for those who are rising
like erections from the dead
getting up from the wounded eras
of the afterlives they’ve spent
trying to make brides of their hospital beds,
addiction is the honeymoon suite
that unveils the princess of the mist
like the seven colours of a rainbow
through the prism of Niagra Falls
just before you go over
and down your own throat
like a tiny barrel of Viagra
you hope will keep you afloat
long enough to thread the needle
like the eye of one more salmon run
before you die.
When chaos denudes reverence
and discloses the pillars of our insitutions
are stacked like poker chips
in an earthquake
without rebar;
when the cornerstones
of our spiritual foundations,
the Himalyas of our own imaginations
pushed up like a mountain
by the rutting of continents
into two hands in prayer
cruelly baptized in the tears of things
that run down their cheeks like rivers,
are shaken into dust on an old book
that once looked into the darkness of the truth
with a lantern of lies,
and you look back down the long road
you’ve just walked
and you see nothing but roadkill,
and your own children among them,
and even the bones we put in the dirt
to rise again like heavenly bread
and the ashes we give back to the sky
like the loneliest of clouds, a bird
that hasn’t learned to fly
poured out of its urn
like smoke from a factory chimney,
and no one knows how to live
or die anymore
or what for,
addiction sucuumbs to itself
and becomes the ligature of the world,
the one-stringed guitar
it thumbs like a spinal cord
to keep the dance going
and the one-eyed wine
it serves to the two-eyed stranger
who stopped to ask for directions,
flowing.
PATRICK WHITE
When everything in life is blooming
I fear the terrible curse
implicit in Basho’s haiku:
for those who say
they have no time for children
there are no flowers.