100 Junkie Nights

Take a 'mountain dew' can
and a thumb tack:
a practiced hand can turn it into a pipe
in a few minutes,
bent just right,
half a square inch of tightly packed holes,
a slightly torn baggie,
and sparkly grass
that promises to
get you through the night
all right

That's old hat for me,
a very hold hat:
15 years and I'm only 27,
a melancholy old "Nirvana" hat

almost as old as the cider streets
of Harnosand, Sweden
a concrete Eden,
16,
taverns in the industrial-factory
section by the sea

shady college parties:
ice-cold beer
loud and barbaric music
loud, scantily-clad girls
group hookahs,
the mood hovering between
euphoria and anarchy:
get out early
if anarchy wins out

'Ecstacy'
art shows,
poetry readings after-hours
at Evo's Java Cafe
where the Ashland 'dreadies' hang out
(plenty of water but
not too much...
the blue-light Buddha's middle path;
buy small, quickly takeable doses
"mind-alteration" is not possession)

Ephedra
to write long and eloquent essays
on hollow, pretentious "prompts"
or memorizing formulas
all-day and all-night
collapsing for 48 hours after the exam,
cold sweats and occasional vomitting
(hold on to your scholarship,
let go of your youth,
always turn 'something' in
on time,
neatly stapled)

Keep a stiff upper lip,
choose superstitious ignorance
or learned insanity,
keep secret compartments,
anything but a nervous breakdown...
even if you are one.
Read, listen, consider
write, paint, record:
leave something for the ages
while you're still alive,
tommorow is never guaranteed

You'll know you're a mad-man
when you find yourself
wandering upper-class streets
on acid,
even though you're cool and together...
because in the eyes of the law
you're committing murder
in your mellow daze
(in other words,
don't do it unless you do)

Safer that way
is cocaine
which is worse in the sense
that it's chemically,
as opposed to psychologically addictive.
Just occasionally I've
let it float into my world...
good stuff from a young small-time dealer
just out a soccer-mom Christian family,
bad stuff from an uptight gangster
who rented bamboo vacation huts
on the north shore Ko Tao Island,
miles of beach resorts:
where yuppies from around the globe
freely drank, toked and joked
with completely bought-off cops:
franks, Japs, yankees, a lot of bosh,
the kind of place where no nationality at all
would raise eye-brows.
And that white powder
would come in handy
when he'd bring me a Thai courtesan...
with the ackwardness,
the wall of latex,
and what not.
That's not legally dangerous,
however, not really.
Being stoned on opium
on a porch with a Thai ninja
way older than the cold war
giant tiger tattooed on his chest,
me holding a flash-light for some Thais
turning it into a heroin is
dangerous...
though not really on that north shore
where no one'd been busted in years
and people dive with massive black-tip sharks
that NEVER bite.
This is 2011
and that was 3-4 years ago:
so it could be different or the same

All this was rather traumatic
so I checked into a psych ward,
and then cleaned up
completely for well over a year,
except for the legal psych drugs
from the doctors...
but I just got worse.
I know why but I don't care
to get too personal or political here.

Anyway, I hung on,
getting more fucked up
(though I didn't get fucked up anymore)
hung on through a soul-dead mental health home,
through months in a psych ward
with diverse, sometimes terrifying patients
(plus art therapy,
excellent food,
and group therapy circles
ranging from dismal to profound)

Eventually,
I was certified disabled and given a check
(and by then I was disabled...)
and slid into alcoholic drinking
and a life-style of quiet desperation,
no more drugs except occasional grass,
no more big gambles,
no more writing,
"No More Games. No More Bombs.
No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming." - H.S.T.

But I was 24, not 67,
and eventually I came out of it
(amid the music of Donovan and The Grateful Dead,)
and,
after a period of steady improvement,
I became
my own head-case Hindu Universe
perpetually expanding to new intellectual and artistic heights
only to collapse into drug-sickness, psychosis,
or depression
(usually aware that I lived
in a silicon stone age,
where truth had negative value:
where people carried brief-cases through
an omni-present haze of new and old superstitions,
many dressed in numbingly subtle pseudo-intellectualism...
their tasteful spectacles
completely impervious to rational points,
and all this under the shadow
of the receding cold war
and slowly spreading nuclear weaponry)

But I continued to seek truth,
to study, to write and publish prolifically.
This was largely made possible
by the legal pain medicine
which became an increasingly large
part of my life
(totally replacing other drugs
except for medical marijuana,)
which were in turn made possible
by head-aches and testable deep muscle spasms,
which sometimes put me through the kind of pain
that would drive a person to rational sucide...
were he not passionately in love
with life and art

So you try to eat well and exercise,
take myriad supplements;
vitamin D and fish-oil are key:
too many rather than too few.
By now, it's all old hat:
women, re-hab, money, jail,
being brilliant, being stupid,
libraries and bars,
psychedelic hallucinations,
and the whole information super-highway
(through which you're connected
to half the people you've ever known,
and a few you never have.)
You stay home more,
and rarely ever stick your neck out.
Your version of risky wildness
is a fairly safe pot purchase
in a Subway
from a young long-hair
with a pot-leaf wristband
and a cheerful, naive "elan,"
followed by a Chicken marinara sandwich
with lots of good veggies

So, you put a blanket by the door,
burn some incense,
smoke some weed
and let it all
take you where it will...
it's another junkie night