Modern pop-politics
is rife with conflicts
over freedom of speech,
The use of language,
The shape of the narrative,
'Phrasing'.
Knowledge
is always political, language
is often contested, consider
the language of drug use:
'Addiction', 'dependence', 'substance use disorder'.
Nevertheless a compassionate idealism strives
to contrast the weighty realism of suffering.

Alas, who can say whether drug use
is a set of choices, or the pattern of habits?
Vying between these drives, I try a few milligrams
of methoxyeticyclidine. This mortal coil, it harkens Absurdia.

The clever craft emerges from
intelligence, willpower. It allows
for healing, or human enhancement,
Provides a means to catalyze inspiration,
Or indeed proffers mere modes of recreation,
And of course a dark side which is unwholesome.

All the same I turn to those fabled schools of Alteration,
Of Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion,
Of Mysticism, and Restoration;
Its immanent applications

and its transcendent source:
Metaphysics. Knowledge, experience.
It is worth acknowledging recreation, playfulness.

The pace of life quickens, recognition
dawns in the dark corners of my mind,
To come alive, it's been so long, too long
to feel some; embrace these sways, to seek
eternity. Town
was such a remnant today. I could sense that
buzz hanging on the dusk: electric, ecstatic, but
I did not give chase.
Is it anhedonia when one's pleasures become mere
intellectual pursuits: my love of pharmacy, of music?

That recognition flickers
like a candle in the dark,
It was lit for you.

Chatting with Friday in The Blue Note,
She mentioned leaving for Scotland.
A friend commented on your body
language, I could not shake that.

Thought I saw Monday walking The Promenade,
I turned my head only to see you also looking
back. We waved, and it struck me

how we were kids once
and how much time has passed.
Passin’ Me By,

Not for lack of knowledge, I languish.
Not for lack of wisdom, I'd indulge.
Would lusting after apotheogens
make it any less anything? I can

administer those transhuman
Cybran stimulants, posthuman
Aeon dissociatives, and atavistic
psychedelic trips, but my longing
for harmony and synchrony might
bid alchemy and witchcraft farewell.
Ambivalence, comfort, a perfect static
in which the Anemoi are bottled, swirling.

This auld warlock does continue to ponder
the mysteries of quantum metaphysics:
The study of the smallest constituents
identifiable in an act of cognition,
An effort to identify the process
of quality and likeness.

Oh, to be Anonymous
in that sweet darkness.

Ah, to be Philalethes
in the pursuit of truth.

Joy, to be with Pasithea
enveloped by relaxation.

Sorrow, to be a **** Lord
that never to comes-down.

At the end of Nimmo's Pier
on a mid-week evening in July,
I gaze across the bay
with the city to my back.

To my left a heron potters about
in orange lamplight, from my right
two lads' conversation drifts
across the harbor docks,

Behind me the city thrums
with its mid-summer's nightlife.
My over-stimulation from three days
of intense work fades, my solemn thoughts