One More Hit

Yearning and cravings so bright
they trip the light of my hovering
steel wings flapping above dreams of
one more hit in that sanctuary called
No Return.

I never asked for steady hands.
I've held the ones that clawed and cried
and dragged themselves through wastelands.

It calls me by a different name
at wrong turns, while the spurned hours
of an old epoch forget the single seed
buried beneath the slow,
clotted bleed of using and drinking.

Your name has not changed for what you've done.
Not forever, just one hour, the whole unbroken
sky for hating yourself self a little less.

My trauma cinched these seat belts tight,
a cul-de-sac of knowing where freedom devours
its own shadow. And my small, defiant body.
Or that tiny ass up in my face blocking the
view of a pile of benzos.

I'm not scrubbed-clean altars.
I'm the the burnt-down house,
still standing crooked but not in your way.

But I take another, and another still,
the porous pill so full of promise,
a small white lie of overspreading pall.
It swears my words can grow talons again,
that my stories can sharpen into eagle eyes.

I've seen you curled like a comma,
unfinished, in rooms where the light
gave up and left.

So, I stop. There is no such thing as escape.
For having created a god who learns to die,
the likelihood of moving again in form,
wicked or not, in a teacup of temptation,
is so significant it hurts.

Tomorrow you'll want to burn this poem,
call it weakness, call it a lie.
That's better than pretending the wolf's gone by.