I was the needle's cathedral,
spires of glass pierced into the skin's soft parish.
Inside me, the liturgy of ruin—
a pharmacopoeia alphabet that hummed
through every vein like electric psalms.
God came in ampoules—
and he spoke in benzodiazepine tongues.

Melbourne's gutters were my inheritance,
cicadas shrieking hymns in a summer too bright to bear.
The sky hung itself daily
on the eucalyptus limbs,
and I, Lazarus of the alleyways,
tugged salvation from plastic and powder.

They called me clever—
a boy made of books and dead languages,
a mind like a dissected frog.
But genius is no charm against oblivion,
and the tongue that quotes Ovid
can still slur,
can still drown in a needle's whisper.

I made love to chemistry,
each compound a bride.
Morphine, my first wife,
came dressed in snow and silence.
****, a ***** in sequins,
sang me through seven black midnights.
Fentanyl, the widow,
kissed me like final rites.

My arms became maps of misdirection—
a Braille for the blind doctors
who prodded and tisked.
Their words were gauze and bureaucracy,
but I needed absolution,
not a chart.

Still—there were mornings.
Pale and accidental.
I would wake in the arms of something human,
a kettle hissing like mercy,
the birds dumb in their forgiveness.
Somewhere, the Pacific cracked its knuckles
against a sunburnt shore.

In rehab they fed us poems
as if they were bread.
I chewed on Plath,
on Lowell,
on half-gods from colder hemispheres.
But no one spoke of the south—
where the light is upside-down,
and the stars—unfamiliar.

Mother, I am not the son you stitched.
I am the scar.
I am the glass you swept for years.
Yet here I sit,
with tea trembling in the cup,
the spoon ringing its nervous bell.

The cravings still come—
not as wolves but ghosts.
They whisper in aisles of pharmacies,
sigh down my spine in supermarkets.
But I have learned
to answer with silence,
to bless the ache
instead of feeding it.

I do not trust peace.
It feels like the first calm in a horror film.
But I walk, anyway—
through the jacaranda bloom,
through the smell of petrol and salt,
my veins no longer desperate rivers
but dormant lines
waiting for ink
and nothing else.

I do not know if I am healed.
Only that I am here.
And there are no needles in the room.