I’m taking the following poem to an open mic to read next week, it’s on missing being an addict.
I wrote it a couple of years ago and forgot about it. Reading back over it last night really moved me.
It’s called: The Location I Rest In
Sometimes I think
I am fed up of this work.
Fed up with seeing
with no option to un-see.
Fed up with being in a perpetual
(rude)
awakening
and relentless
restless
initiation.
Just fed up.
Where is my break?
Will I ever catch a fucking break?
Please let me rest.
And I look to something
somewhere beyond me
to pay me my due
assaulted by the alarm
yet unable to hit snooze.
I look to something
somewhere beyond me
to recognise my hard work!
and bestow divine permission
to go back to sleep.
(Just for a week?)
You know what I sometimes miss?
The head rush of that first cigarette of the day.
And gossiping in the girls toilets on some cocktail of class As.
I think in a way
a small part of me misses the simplicity of suffering
and then having some woozy relief from it
and that being my life.
It is the tiniest part and I don’t want to admit that it is there.
But every time I find myself in the midst of another vascillation
of waking up out of yet another dream
every time another layer of fog is clearing
every time I feel like I am shouting into a void
and no one is listening
and my mind makes this path a battle I’ll never win -
I reminisce on the strange comfort of living in addiction.
And incredibly, it is just the medicine.
Because through the nostalgia
and the haze of hedonism
is this ever pristine reverberation
a whole body knowing
that seeing things as they truly are
is the land of heaven.
And recognising myself
for what I truly am
is the location I rest in.
#pleb #nostr #poetry #spiritualawakening #addiction #recovery