I remember when I couldn’t wait to write. Pen and paper called to me all the time. I was a word junkie; the pen, my syringe, the paper my vein, a reverse injection - I shot up by shooting out. Words, words, words spraying out of me; a bottomless artery hit. The more I bled out the more I craved to bleed, to write. Any where, any time. No waiting for dark alleys or quiet corners. I’d get high on a bench in front the police station if my craving called. Nothing illegal about this fix. Dark, dark, dark became that voice inside me, that scream demanding to be exhaled on a notebook. It may be noon by the clock but it was almost always sunset or midnight by my ink needle. Oh to get back that trashy rip off of a dollar store novel I wrote at fourteen. "The Grizz." It must have been total excrement, cheap crack cut with hack cleaner, but it was my first obsession with a long trip. I couldn’t wait to ride. That trip seemed never ending. It wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t stop. Then it was off roaded and lost in an accident. The needle broken off in my arm, my drug wasted. That didn’t stop me from tripping, oh no. The prose had power. There was poetry in my poison and I put it down. Every chance, every inspiration. Song, book, stranger’s hair, I’d squeeze everything I saw down, melt it in my spoon. Into my vein, out of my pen. I tried a couple ideas for long trips, mixed the chemicals, different concoctions. I tried another story once, my Greek jewel, but it was lost on a new drug technology, a broken disc. Just another way to stick it in and break it off. Lost. Sometimes the old ways are the best. First to paper then to Perfect. Words are still words either way. Trippin’ is still trippin’. Then some how I got distracted. Strangled, choked. The shadows I saw in life gagged the darkness of my voice. My voice, the urge, what I wanted to hear, the only thing I wanted to hear, drowned. The quietest OD ever. I let the darkness in life cover the darkness in me, my desire, my voice, my addiction. I want my addiction back. I want the craving, the screaming, my paper veins open and ready for my pen syringes. I’ve been clean so long. I want to be dirty. Crazy, obsessed filthy. Track marks up and down every piece of blank paper that comes within my view. No page gets by me without a line or two. My hands shaking, almost unable to keep up with the flow. My chest bursting, more, more, more! If ever there was some way to walk backwards an inadvertently taken twelve steps I want to run it! Rewind me and unbury that desire. My addiction can’t truly be dead, can it? There’s got to be a way to stab it in the heart and start it pumping. There’s got to be more to me than this flat line existence. Demons can’t die. Devils can’t be destroyed. My black angels flew. Used to fly. High. High on the words. I’ve got to wake up before the years of clean living roll on and over any bit of desire I have left, until I can’t remember the passion of addiction.
January 1, 2009
