I am apprehensive about dating,
It's something I feel I should pursue
while I'm still young; part of me wishes
to come closer, yearning for someone other,
To stand outside oneself and be with another.

Another part of me takes comfort in solitude,
My old soul is content, the sun goes down.
There are times when I reject warmth
and feel the cold universe
run through me;

Eternity is always just a few moments away,
Seeking the edge of chaos, searching for someone

Months ago I awoke
to an almighty hypnopompic brain-zap
provoked by dreams of lisdexamphetamine-laced cereal.
Forceful, shocking, agonizing; strange to have felt this
when I lack any acquaintance with Vyvanse, and
when I am clean of residuals. That a dream
should cause real pain, such reaction
in my being, I wonder how
my brain contoured
the experience.

Weeks ago I grappled
with a prolonged tension headache
so I administered paracetamol, ibuprofen/codeine,
And buprenorphine/naloxone. Those opioids
provoked strange daydreams, to countenance the many idioms
I've grokked over.

I used to think my superpower was depression,
I'd go around seeking pain
because nothing else would sooth me; and with each pang
I came a little closer, chasing it
like a true addict, savoring my damage,

Exalting in my lonely conscience.

When I awoke the opiates were leaving my body
so I lay in their dark waves of intemperate sensation
among what thoughts etch onto the inside of my skull
and found myself driving with a concussion
towards a home for misanthropes.

Apotheogen
n.
A psychoactive substance that induces alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, or behavior for the purposes of subduing personal drives in a profane context.
The functional opposite of an entheogen.

From the root, apotheo- (apotheosis, to deify) and the suffix -gen (genesis, to come into being).

Apotheogenesis can be understood as
the act of concealing or obscuring the self
through the singular focus of one's will onto a pattern or substance,
Raising it to a god-like position within their ideology.
The individual is thus subsumed by it, distracting from
dissonant parts of the self which are incongruent
with the whole. Such parts become hidden
though their drives remain in conflict.

I have been quiet these passing months,

Reflecting on my desires
amid this summer's solitude;
Their difference, and appearance,
These attitudes towards my future.
Odd to consider what changes in a year.

In May I moved back in with a few friends,
But after a month I move back out again.
As June comes to a close I find myself
at odds again, I assess 2C-T-21 but
it is unremarkable with effects
resembling a subdued 2C-E.
Given its toxic metabolites
I have no interest going
any further into it.
I guess they can't all be winners.

I attend the 2nd conference in
Philosophy and Psychedelics Studies
hosted by the University of Exeter. I applaud
the commitment and passion of this disparate group
of drug-addled academics, but still I am wary of our efforts.
It is a hard to study a thing
which alters the very faculties
of those who partake of it. As for
my own contribution, an old concept,
Apotheogenic.

Values are malleable things,
Shaped over the course of our lives,
Slowly changeable except during extremes
which necessitate a flip, provoked by revelation or dissonance.
I used to value a capacity to be non-judgemental, is that hubris?

To suffer through confusion, to take pleasure in mania,
To soar with impulsivity, to drown in melancholia.
To play with fire, to pray to madness, to savor
one's pain, to wish to forget all the hurt, and
when one finally does, to realize the loss
of one's soul.

So I spent years
coming down, I sank into mediocrity, troubled
by my prospects; disenfranchised, devalued.
I reneged upon knowledge and pleasure;
I reneged upon curiosity, compassion.
I might be between values, between
integrity and wisdom, these are
no mere platitudes, for I am

I wander through town by day,
Stopping at Sparch to chat.

I meander about town in the eve,
Chasing the hues of dusk.

I tear up in misplaced anxiety but,
Keeping my eyes on the sky

I am transfixed by what is above us,
Spacing out into that golden indigo fade

I know I am lost, yet I am with the horizon.
Lost in the sauce,

I dream of escape, albeit to an unknown destination.
Bathing in this, 1⁄f

Do nothing without intention,
Feel for the context.

Focus on others,
Be yourself.

By the Spanish Arch
a few kind crusty folks
talk in the March sunlight.

Soft incantations of sweet trad
spill from a concertina, tin whistle
and fiddle, sloshing out an ambiance.

An old fella' makes a poor man's black velvet,
The ladies drink Estrella Galicia and San Miguel.
Another lad jokes: my grief counselor died last week

but he was so **** good I didn't care.

A motley crew, good-natured and friendly,
Drawn to session like moths to a flame;
Always I wonder whether I belong.

"I think in his heart Frodo is still in love with the Shire:
The woods, the fields…little rivers. I'm old Gandalf.
I know I don't look it, but I'm beginning to feel it"

I took some suboxone
and wandered down to Dead Man's Beach,
Drifting over the sands, blown out, floating away
in the Atlantic wind,

I forget what troubles me.

The plateaux and caverns which map
my cognitive landscape correspond
by virtue of something; something
determines the salience of beliefs
and their ability to traverse this

I'm sick of believing in things.
Lets break the dialectic
and go for a swim

I take 25mg of DPH to sleep. No effect.
I am feverish, restless.

In the morning I test positive.
I experience symptoms between a cold and flu.
Fatigue, headache, congestion, dry chesty cough,
Changes in taste, constriction of pupils, nerve pain
in the roots of my teeth, and cognitive fog. After three days I mend.
After ten days my isolation ends.

That soporific dose of diphenhydramine went unnoticed, blotted out
by the onset of coronavirus.

May your word be supple with optimism
and may their cognitions follow suit.
I took a little 2C-D tonight
and prayed to move

Old friends corrupted by the apotheon,
Old fiends so wretched.
New **** as if we're more wholesome,
New hope for a free agent.

The weekend comes and goes,
I should party more. At night I go driving
around G-town in my old Lexus.

How does a man on earth live,
Does he live like this?
Exhausted,

Some bad habits
are etched into us.

I drank Havana Club
'tres años' to ring 20β2 in,

Surrounded by a few friends
(and honored to call them such),

I worry sometimes they're too good
for me. I am torn by my history, in 20ζ2

I am between selves.

My head's spinning
with the flaws of the earth.

Commit to the tailspin
and let the truth wash over us.

What I want is a mystery
yet I ruminate over our prospects.

I'm so afraid I won't ever be strong enough
to be in a relationship.

Up until recently
I craved solitude.

As part of a longstanding personal tradition
I do drugs alone on my birthday.
This year I do flualprazolam and 2C-C.

I turn 27, and it occurs to me
I don't want to spend another birthday
doing drugs on my own.

A switch flipped,
I sought company.

So I found my people, drank two bottles of ***
and did a few bumps of 4Fucking-MilesPerHour
before eventually walking home at 7am on Sunday.

I find myself dreaming of strange tides
and awesome shores. I mix some ***
and ginger, in my headphones I hear
a storm. Now everything goes dim

and I feel it. Drink is a writer's drug,
It allows one to lose their poise and swim.
Remember when we cared less and felt more.
I lost this when I yearned for a normal life, but

it is in my nature to seek this thing.
It is within me, it will rise again.
I tried to forget about a world
but the world remembered

and said:
We are lost,
We are lonely,
We are forgotten,

We are ephemeral,
We are the next gen,
We are the algorithm,
We are the new ****.

Embodiment says more about consciousness
than symbolism or analysis;
"Your emotions become your reality".

What anticharms and antistrange ways lie beyond us?

Our eyes take care in their saccades,
We skim the surface, brushing over one's skin
as if to remark that I am here, searching for something.

Being and dissociation.

Enough with these low doses, I feel like some real therapy.

A strong dose of some rather rare material, a designer dissociative
once highly popular, now virtually extinct: methoxetamine.

I disperse 47 milligrams into water and sup it, tentatively.

I feel the usual fear as a foreign chemical enters my brain en masse
and begins to alter the fabric of my mind.
It has a relatively long come-up, 45-90 mins.

In due time the chaos begins, I drift off into that aeon M-verse.
Eventually I get comfortable and listen to Skyrim atmospheres.

I have an epistmic vision, a vision of human knowledge as
increasingly ubiquitous, in line with the proliferation of modern ICT.
The use of tools, of signs and language is a gift unlike any other.
That we might imagine the past or a future. We are most fortunate
to have these stories, concepts and imaginings,
Things that allow us to venture beyond our home;
Things to remind us there's something to come back to.
They ask us what we want
and we answer: to share in this.
It asks me what I want and I answer:
To contribute, to feel this wash me away

such that I am no longer marooned.

An overcast autumn sky settled in
and fall let loose. Uncertain, lose it.
Lost,

Use it.
I had strange dreams of you last night
actually. It's been some time

since I dreamed about anyone
realmente. Bring out all the carotenoids and anthocyanins,

Bring down the foliage; America is an empire in decline.
X is the new Y.

Came home from Berlin
transmetropolitan,

Came home from NYC
chasing the apotheon.

Back in Galway
I dissolve ♄ere


♐︎his instance; of
being otherwise

October looms.
Autumn is here,
I feel an eagerness

to leave and change color.
Cycling these medieval streets,
The scent of **** and rain-clouds

float through the town, NewDad plays
in my headphones. Think I'll skip winter
this year, travel to the southern hemisphere.

I sat in The Square, surrounded
by throngs of skaters, sesh-heads
and other humans out on the town
for Skate Culture night.
It may be
the last dry day of Autumn
in G-town.

You chat with familiar characters
or familiarize yourself, you hear them
trying to sort, mulling over their situation,
Lamenting their day-jobs while trying to avoid
the reek of mass public intoxication. Every weekend
thousands of pandemic drinkers congregated here
and summer's not quite over

so long as it's dry outside.
I watch people skate, I wonder
what's this feeling mean?
This brief, fleeting recognition
as I scan the crowds, pick out faces
from the inhabitants of
my home city.

It is not sonder,
They are not random passersby,
Their lives' complexities are known to me
having grown up around them. To know a town,
To be able to look around on a night out
and recognize so many faces;
Some insatiable nostalgia

even though I am at home

When I was small
I'd sometimes hear
a roaring in my mind, ex nihilo.

Summer's end,
September appears.
The passage of time is

unbelievable. I'll leave my home-town
and travel far away. I wonder what it is
I'm running from. The inheritance

of madness. I went out last night
and got off with someone.
What am I afraid of?

I still yearn
for those seeping rays
of zodiacal light

that creep into the horizon
as the long sesh comes to an end.
5-MAPB reminds me

of where it all began: youthful escapism.
A conviction that we were part of something,
Our transcendension rituals.

Do I still believe? I am so tempted
by flualprazolam, that it could lift me
away from anxiety, to feel the back-scatter

of thoughts adrift
in blissful weightlessness; but
it is only an apotheogen, whereas I long

Went to bed feeling down.
Had a dream
they scanned my brain, doc says
I'm depressed.

I ask,
"Is it that obvious?"
Woke up blue, wondering
when I'll be able to feel love again.

For weeks I've been stuck in this mood,
Wandering with aimless hope
for an uncertain future, longing
to escape the country, listening to

some indie reverbstorm tunes, dreaming
strange nostalgia in my alienated hometown.

My head's ringing, that serotonin itch.
Everyone's doing things; all I wanted
was to be forgotten, some dreams do
come true. Now I stare up at the sky,
Face-up in the middle of my street,

Such inarticulations of thought
as I meander, sometimes
lonely, longing for
company yet

content in emotion.
For when I quiet myself
I hear the world's rhythms
and their harmony;

I see dim summer's twilight
through heavy-quilted rain-clouds.
It is something to cycle through

after dusk, a time like no other,
About the town
ever-dear to me

Took half a milligram of bromazolam
after a long week, thoroughly enjoyed
the anxiolysis. Fifteen hours later
I can still feel its metabolites
at work, yet that feeling
when the world became a friendlier place
is unyielding.
I wonder how long I have before the rebound hits.

Odd to crave the lightness of something so apotheogenic,
Knowing full well
it's darkness.

There are many practical ways of disrupting the body
to produce interesting cognitive and phenomenological effects.

There should also be ways of consolidating and expanding upon
****** processes which extend to our cognitive system
to produce unparalleled psychoactive effects.

It took many years to track down the compound
but I finally acquired it in the spring of '21.

It caused increases in timbral perception and aural acuity.
I could hear marching drums coming from the city center,
From across the lough I could pick out their faint rhythms.

At times things sound as if they've been shifted a 5th down
or have reverberant/echoic tails on them.

My housemate found it hard to understand me
when I neglected to pronounce my consonants
because I was not paying attention to the higher frequencies.
Despite this the cognitive effects are gentle
and unobtrusive (which is relieving
as tryptamines can produce confusion,
in concert with their enhancement and suppression cycles).

Music is listenable at this dose, and sense of rhythm intact;
Would that be the case at higher doses?

During the offset my ears felt warm,
Waves of spontaneous physical sensation washed over them.
This tingling feeling reoccurred a couple times
over the next day, albeit faintly.

Interesting that there would be an aural psychedelic.
Intriguing that other base tryptamines should be inclined
towards other sensory modalities.

DiPT for sound, MET for vision, MiPT for touch;
What sense DMT, DET, and DPT affect is unclear.
As is, the known psychedelics have a broad range
of effects. The particular specializations of the xxTs
are most curious.

At the heart of any analytic or scientific endeavor is logic,
Simple components used to build more complex propositions
which picture a way the world could be.

Any logical statement can be true or false
depending on its validity
and correspondence with the world.

The issue of correspondence, of soundness, will always foreground any application of logic to the world.

Logic can sate that analytic desire for objectivity or universality but this comes at the cost of certainty.

There is a limit to the amount of simultaneous precision one can impose upon the world.

Regardless of whether it is in the spatial, temporal, or cognitive domain, the nature of focus is exclusionary.
One cannot know with exactitude, both position and momentum, time and frequency, being and becoming, and so on.

Our ability to use logic is critical to us, it is a defining human characteristic and indeed is that thing which enables us to be critical.

The application of logic, representation and an ability to turn in unto itself (i.e. to verify its internal coherency) is its power.
Logic is always applied for purposes.


At the heart of poetry is the act of poiesis, the process of creation which reconciles mind and world.

We may say this of any artistic or aesthetic process (and indeed, art will abuse logic or go against reason for the sake of expression).

Such a process indubitably corresponds to the world in the instances of its creation, and there is certainty as to its correspondence.

What’s more, an aesthetic may be felt by others.
The logical contents of a poetic sentence may be invalid
but can still be meaningful (for otherwise it would not be poetic).

Poetry and lyric are inextricably bound up in language.
They closely track the threshold of reason and logic, but toe the line.

The possibility for meaningful communication arises independent from the probability of logical communication.
Meaning need not correspond to logic.
However, aisthesis is in the eye of the beholder,
and in this way art has is own issue of correspondence which is between others; thus it is an issue of interpretation.

Where logic strives for objectivity and is left with uncertain truths,
Poetry strives for inter-subjectivity but does not know it’s reach.


So things can be connected by meaning and felt as well as by cause and reasoned, but the relationship between meaning and causality then
is not a logically necessity
so much as meaningful necessity.

To establish a firmer contact between the two domains, we must constrain them through a practical bridge. There are many such crossings, but the stability of this bridge is most apparent in poetry.

Looking closely we see a relationship between phenomenal signs
and we fill in the empty spaces with proposed causes
such that it fulfills both meaning and logic.

Enough of this dark ****.
Asking me "bro, do you even know
how hard it is to **** yourself"
after taking potentially fatal doses
of various CNS depressants. I know

better than most. I cannot watch this.
Our lifelines are fragile things
and I shouldn't have to stare down Atropos
for anyone other than myself.
I wanna live.

"I want to hold on to the innocence I got".
We make our own fate, weaving stories
to tell ourselves, measuring the world
with them, and wearing our destinies out.

Last night the claw in my head ensnared me again,
This morning I listen to myself and try to forget.
Give me some early Caribou, Booka Shade,
Chemical Brothers, anything to help me
forget. Anything to make me feel;
Any anything‽ True neutral,
Like it's any better
than you:
My history, stories
about the town. My psychology,
Mental isn't it, we only know what's behavioral.
Things otherwise meaningless
crop up in memory.
What's trauma?
People so colorful.
Why is my heart grey,
Why does my head fade,
Why would someone chose

Do what seems to be a good idea.

Good is better than evil after all,
We would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones.

Be mindful that
good, evil, law, and chaos
are prejudices and dangerous extremes.

Act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion.

Walking thru my new old suburbia
on this quiet June eve, it's in the air and
I'm at ease. Its chill frisson has me so captive;
A sunset vespers some comfortable views,
I feel it fade as peaceful night sets in.
I am wandering the streets again.
I scope about these estates.
That indigo hue
in the sky

Innocuous moments stretch through the night
like unwritten nostalgia
condemned to change forever.

Feeling somewhat high-strung, I decided to try pagoclone
thinking it might soften things. I assumed was a mere anxiolytic
and ate 10mg on a full stomach
so it was late before it really came on.

A few hours later the early anxiolysis shifted,
I noticed some color enhancement, slight loss of
motor coordination and of interest in complex tasks.
It is less amnesic than zopiclone, even so 5am appeared
seemingly out of nowhere
as did the hallucinations.
This was unexpected
albeit not entirely unwelcome.

At first there were occasional, drifting 2D patterns
which rolled across the surface of things.
These became 3D enhancements, the surface of an object
would bulge, contort, and follow my head-turns
or sway with my disposition. The kitchen chandelier's arms
followed my eyes as they cradled their little light-bulbs,
When I smiled or grimaced they made faces back.

Later I mistook some crawling patterns on my desk
for an insect invasion, but knowing my mind could not be trusted
I made a video to see would it fail to capture my hallucination.
Sure enough, this video reproduced what I saw:
A tide of glitches flowing along the beech veneer,
Sweeping over the grain
like bit-crushed waves along a rotoscoped coast.
Satisfied by my evidence, I decided to deal with it in the morning.

At this point I had recognized a few hallucinations.
I thought it possible this was delusion, but what is remarkable
is how I was unable to see past my empirical conviction
that this was indeed happening; such confusion.

As I lay in bed I saw a gnome (of the garden variety)
and his angel-mate perched on the rail of my curtains.
He smiled menacingly, and held her close as if to dance,
A waltz with the fabric. Eventually I fell asleep

In the morning I watched a video of my desk,
Filmed haphazardly, punctuated by a desperate wince.
Now I ran my hand over it's inanimate surface
and scratched at the grain in disbelief.
There is a vague feeling of dread,
A negative afterglow
left after acute delusion
and temporal dysfunction.
I supposed I must integrate this brush with unreality.

"Those who are not angry
at the things they should be
are thought to be fools";

Yet anger impairs cognition
and blinds us to its exact source.
Is righteous anger always so coarse?

We are blinded by these flashbulb memories
born among a storm of cortisol
and adrenaline.

Those chemicals course through us
as a part of belief
in an effort to elicit change.

Yet
"...the good-tempered [hu]man
is not revengeful, but rather

The ebb and flow
of a mind which knows it is in flux
yet also belongs to that unchanging one
whose breath animates us.

I fall into unconscious shuddering
with desperation and mute wonder
and hidden hopes and silent screams

I recognize what's become fixed within me.
Lost progress, traumatic laughter.
The Apotheon is calling

once again, I'm stone cold
but don't want to be sober. I try so hard
to get over myself, my loneliness.
I got all this poison, and I don't want to share.

I'm losing my time on earth
to the gods of the underworld.
I turn around and see Orpheus
following me

In the evening
we titrated our doses
cautiously insufflating DMXE
until its threshold appeared; old hope,
That one could return
to the m-verse.

We listened to thumping drumcode
and watched a Soviet adaptation
of The Lord of the Rings.
Nonsensical  contexts were generated by
the juxtaposition of techno with our Russian Frodo
and Gandalf the Red.

I consumed no more than 7mg
and enjoyed little over two hours
of mild dissociation, pleasant warmth
and good company before the effects began to gently fade.
It is worthy of further assessment, but carefully
given its current age.

What of reward and belief,
These pathways that call us.
They drag me from this 'verse

even though I feel so bad
sometimes, sometimes
I just want to sleep

'cause I'm tired
and dreams are weird.
They seem beyond me, I feel

without control
but it's alright,
'cause I know

I took 15mg of mirtazapine on Sunday evening out of pure curiosity.

As a result of its histaminergic activity there is sedation
yet I find I am easily surprised, jumpy but tired.
Initial slight sensations of arthralgia.

After a few hours I identify mild eidetic imagery,
Ever-so-slightly persistent with closed eyes.
These visual hallucinations emerge
from imagination, neither delirious nor lucid.
Perhaps they're more like vivid daydreams
and would leave with tolerance.

This faint mode of hallucination led into and out of sleep,
Supplanting hypnogogic and hypnopompic imagery.
What I remembered of dreaming was much the same:
Nonsensical conetent with similar imagery.
Upon waking its effects were still apparent.

Perhaps they no longer excite me as they used to
but I am still fascinated by the compounds.
It is a life-long passion of mine to understand,
And a personal project to document psychoactivity.
I attempt to cultivate some objectivity
towards those molecules, though it may be  unrealistic
to expect this of their processes.

Consciousness is itself a process.

Eyestrain my dull mind
as I wander through the village.
Wandering through memory, listening.

I pause and feel gravity, feeling it
as a loss of control
and for a moment this thrills me
as I lean back
and fall into it; I return home

and fall asleep, to dream
of simple human connection.

I enter a house, brought there by
a friend to make new acquaintances.
The ambience is party-like, lighthearted
but quite excitable. A mash of bootleg pop
pipes out the walls, I recall
elements of Diving Faces by Liquid Child
interspersed with strange rāga leads.
My friend and I relax, lying side-by-side
as if resting. Tentative kiss, and I kiss back
before waking to that

fading sensation. I lay there for a time, hoping
this vivid hypnopompia
would just go on.

I watched Girl Interrupted
and felt slightly better about myself

but wondered when I would end up in hospital.
Everything looks perfect in the half-light

if you've got perfect eyesight.
I have such chronopathy

for these moments
that tear at me.

Heaven is dark,
and the dark is warm.

Much that once was still is
for one has lived to remember it.