Addiction

Addiction


I have learned to be self-sufficient.
Nothing is reliable, not even fate.
The world changes, and changes again.
Don’t expect.  Take what comes.
All the pleasures?
All the unexpected gifts?
The hard part is getting through the time, the days,
but also the nights.
I read, and think about different kinds of lives,
how it might be if, if, if ...
Very well, if you know that it’s a story, played out for fun.
What great fun, fantasies hidden from day life,
alone because I am too different to blend.
What entertainment could thrill enough,
capture this old, toughened heart?
Fun I neither seek nor enjoy.
I look for some way to make it all go away,
to escape, to imagine.
In that image, to dance on a pin of light,
soft green light.
Music is the air.  Building in and out of crescendo,
taking flight like a falcon, carrying imagined me.
I am free in the only real sense of freedom.
I have no boundaries.
I am what the mystics call Bliss.
This is so rare, so much a blessing,
it most certainly cannot be relied upon,
can not be expected.
Mostly, I stink, am bruised and sore.
Mostly the air is filled with disease
that can’t kill me, but does not mean me well.
Mostly my thoughts are dark, self-loathing,
but not nearly as much as I loathe this world,
even as it changes.
The changes rarely seem to be for the better
of anyone, not for long.
The long view is mostly full of rot, mildew,
the stench of age and illness.
The will to go on becomes more of a habit,
an addiction.
The only cure for addiction is something better
to believe in.