Void of Tranquillity 🔞

Heroin and sweltering summer days both have a sweet tooth,
Like old junkies with voices that taste of burnt sugar,
Their songs flyblown and ragged, faded to sepia and blue beneath years of beating sun and blazing golden light.

When the rain comes, it hammers down hard enough to rip through cheap paper and fragile skin.
Shreds of posters flap like drowned ghosts, the final encore of a spectacle long past its time.

Treading carefully in the tracks left by their passage,
We must remain circumspect, even under torture,
Interrogated at the point of a stainless steel blade.

Compelled, commanded and bound within the circle,
A vision of veiled discretion in the place of deranged and washed out glamour;
Gallery girls and bacchae bearing un|told narratives of doomed futures, un|wound in plain sight.

#poetry #verse #poem

May 28 at 2:06amWeb
Show threadVoid of Tranquillity 🔞May 28

This needs naming, a bit of extra consideration regarding line breaks, and maybe some kind of annotation to virtue signal the fact that I'm clean and haunted, rather than enhanced and attempting to gain followers for the church of dope.

I was really delighted at how this poem, written in my Signal notes to to self in the middle of the night, dragged itself through my mind with the fully-fledged vision of its world, real and solid and tactile, a peopled and historied place.

This is one of my favourite kinds of flow state while writing, in which the words beneath my fingers must simply describe things that - to some degree - are. These things exist, here and now.

[internally if nowhere else, like the endless city of towers and stairwells and back gardens stacked on tower blocks stacked on river-washed factories]

It's worth losing sleep to pursue that when it imposes itself so dramatically.

#WritingProcess #WritingPoetry #Writing

Show threadVoid of Tranquillity 🔞Jun 17

Well, here's a follow up I simply forgot to post, started two weeks ago or so, and finished today.

to virtue signal the fact that I'm clean and haunted, rather than enhanced and attempting to gain followers for the church of dope

I want to examine this urge to self censor a little more closely, not least because it's a thematic element of the poem itself.

When I was a teen, I took photos of my friends posing nude, preparing drugs and shooting up using a third-hand Praktica (analogue) single-lense reflex camera.

I turned these into art (it would have been better present as documentary photography, but anyway). It wasn't secret.

I showed it to people; it was part of the coursework that got me a qualification with merit at my (high-school equivalent) technical college despite the fact that there I'd sometimes go a couple of weeks without showing up to class.

When LiveJournal came along, I shared poetry, journals, essays, guides, erotic photos and confessionals about my addiction. I don't imagine it would have been difficult to find me.

I suppose the reason I like to clearly note that the drug use that I discuss is not happening at this moment but is instead historical, for all that I am firmly in support of a decriminalised/informed consent model for drug users' rights and liberties, is not that I am more of a target, or more visible, but perhaps because I have more to lose.