you can walk down here among the empty bottles
talk to me
friend
ask me who i am now
i know you felt like you knew me so long ago
and you feel like you don't really know me anymore
and;
it breaks my heart how true that always is so i will tell you the important parts
and you can fill in the blanks.

well the whole story is too long for
a page or a book
really everything i know is long past
(or with length beyond the scope of)
relevance;
it's less than fortuitous to talk about the bad
parts but there's nothing else to say in regard to the
good.
it's like the question that i used to
wonder about
(but since have answered) with
happiness either being the transient state
or the original condition in bearing
(the former holds more answers but fewer conclusions)
and
although
i may have made a choice there,
it
doesn't affect me any more than thoughts of
god or determinism or any of that outside-myself nonsense.

i guess this is all to say i'm a
poet writing a poem
about drugs as they are
classically defined,
or
as i defined them with my use,
or
as society defines/reviles,
(without an emphasis on their purposes and the intents for their use (which often deviate from what is sought) )
aka
"the bad parts"

i
"used drugs"
far too often to
feel happy writing about
to the general public
but then
i am not happy with the nomenclature
- i'm not embarassed about the ibuprofen i took an hour ago that was 4 years 3 months 3 days expired according to the bottle imprint.
i'm not going into
the idea
that drugs can be good because
they are tools
and so forth
i have already discoursed at length on these things
to those ears who were already sympathetic to my meaning.

a long 5 years ago
i
was into
drinking cough syrup
to get high.

even now to look back on it those times were unbelievably euphoric, it felt as though i was building towards something new and fantastic every night, a rising surge of input quelled merely by my own thoughts, my mind taking the throne as supreme commander of situational action.

this is an addictive feeling, to be
master
of one's domain
by subtraction rather than addition

it was only much later
after countless other substances
(the free coke at highschool,
the countless stolen downers,
and occasional uppers,
the shoplifted cough medicine
(tallying into the thousands by monetary value)
that nightmare with the belladonna)

that i smoked pot

it was an
"eye opening experience"
my former
disdain
for the omnipresent inebriant
doing a 180degree
flip to
understanding and desire.

it was a year later then that i came
to
college,
as a freshman,
whose real reason to be here was probably
not really;
really not
about education but about finding more drug dealers.

that guy who sold me all that weed two years ago was a real sleazy kinda (kinda kindly too) dude.
he sold me stuff that rivaled everything else in town.
i smoked
so
much
all
the time
it was beautiful and self-defeating.

i knowingly abjured my life
and
future
just for a while
settling in

being a stoner.
i had all the paraphernalia, broke half of it and bought it again.
rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled

but then the
real drugs
came into my life

not hard but
immaterial.

2c-e,
i bought a gram of it
on the internet
and;
it changed my mind.

if there has ever been a meaning for the phrase "changing one's mind"
well,
that experience changed my mind.

suddenly i saw
human
ity
distinct from society
as the bringer of doom
doom indistinct from society

by planting things.

i saw the logical conclusion of religion
i saw the prehistoric balance, the historic topple

i saw the compounded wasted meaning and opportunity my life affords.
i saw the compounded wasted meaning and opportunity my life affords.

i saw myself die, i voided in the bed.
then i was a ghost for a while, i haunted the walls and my memories in a purgatory where the exit sign was a phrase from my past life.

when my life came rushing back to me in
newfound
sobriety,
i was disappointed because of how
easy and beautiful "death"
had been.

and back and back and back every weekend to the eternal waltz of memories, of wishing i knew how to fix all my mistakes, take back those grades and clean my room and do it right, until i truly lost the mind i had and replaced it with this nervous quiet thing, forever conscious of my mistakes and forever avoiding the thought of it although even that mental exchange was in my mind and nothing negative had been made permanent, because that's how that goes.

and after all this profundity i felt

like i had so many chances to make things
better
and i took a few but not many,
and the easy way out isn't named that for nothing.

it's so much simpler to
fear the judge and
run away from the message.

so even

two
years

after
i know so much less than i knew before
about how to be human.

my life
is
a combination
of thinking,
and waiting
for the right
combination.
that's who i am now.

08/04/2011

Author's Note: phew that came out in a flurry

Posted on 08/05/2011
Copyright © 2024 Corey Lockaby