There is no justice on piss-stained floors
which carry the burden of every broken
body-broken-mind-broken-hash-pipe and halo dust
atop a thin mattress soaked with God-knows-what.
Cross our toes and mutter until the next
nurse with the next Thorazine trip in a post-nasal
dripping whine stabs us in the ass again. (Oh, baby!)
Not allowed to watch the television today
all for flipping off the government cameras
embedded behind the screens
while Barney sings “I Love You, You Love Me”
over and over and over will it ever end?
We know Barney is the Anti-Christ. And a purple pedophile.
Let’s pretend to be Batman again, flapping
our hospital gowns and shrieking for no reason.
That needle might seek us out again.
We aren’t getting better days-months-years later
still on every med imaginable and some not even
scientifified yet—or whatever you Docs do
in your spare time. Roll in money, mix more
chemical compounds that we turn into more defiance
just to get more scientifified dope. Oops—
Big Bro knows our sullied secret now, but it’s still time for another dose.
Please pass the spoon for—umm—safe keeping.
Sure, rehab works for quitters. None of the “we” are.
So we sit in group session and talk about Mickey Mouse,
atom bombs, flashback nightmares and melting walls.
Oh, the pretty colors. Who said LSD wasn’t a beautiful thing?
We say we want to be Mickey Mouse, mousing through dissolving hidey-holes
in bricks of the basement while some Meth-freak asshole
builds another bomb. What a nightmare!
Ha, ha: got more Thorazine from that bitch with a beard.
Maybe it’s a moustache, but we can’t tell—too blurry
anymore. In a minute, she might blink her lips.
Ah, piece and quiet. Piece of ass while ball-gagged qualifies.
Maybe we can play ping pong tomorrow,
tell more lies for the effect we desire, tap-a-pat-tap
our veins for. Getting cranky is slow without Speed, but
give us a minute and we can accommodate those mood swings.
Just watch. No, not the TV because Batman (“The Man”) says so. Stupid cameras.
We’ll be on that see-saw roller coaster of binge and purge
and pills and withdrawal and manic and depression
and obsessing about the lightbulb blinking in the bathroom
since we know it’s Morse code for something.
Riding highs and lows with every-dose-every-needle-every-body
busted before we ever played ping-pong or swing set steeple chase
to see just who’s the real crazy here—us or “The Man”.
Ten Kool-Aid packages on the guy who invented pills
to “cure” addiction. Any takers? We didn’t think so.
Snort the sugar lines and move it along so that we can
have our turn at medical benediction:
to receive the body-of-Christ-in-a-gel-cap across our tongues and rock
side-to-downside in the psycho-babble homeostasis chamber
while Doc-the-Man counts his blessing of bills in the collection basket
labeled Incoming and stamped with eagles. We’ve seen it.
No justice and piss again. Pissed again. And still, no checkmark on the chart
of getting better. Maybe Doc and Ratchet-with-facial-hair
are close enough to see us for what we are: hopeless/helpless.
But we can play OCD once more if we all hum along.
Why? We forgot the damn words. Oh, crap—no,
don’t make us leave. Doorways are frozen places to ferment in
and it’s awfully hard to keep the candle burning
long enough to make everything right. To fix it all away.
Just for me; that’s all the “we” there ever was.