Addiction

 
The vice crawls across a table,
finds a crack in a wood-silled window,
pauses, waits, catches flies.

We've all got one, or five,
though there's something kindred
in the ones that are inevitably self-defeating.
The ones that collapse in on themselves,
like a root after Autumnal hollowing.

I watch my Grandmother along the North Sea
eat her wars into an oblivion,
suck the fingers of those who bruised her,
bury the heart so deeply,
no one could find it's wings,
so pressures become physical rather than mental,
for some reason those feel of more worth.

I took to smoking when the darkness flew,
when I was left, all gravity and ground,
laid out rolled addictions as if a pathway to an end -
or closer to bees, or closer to connection,
or closer to the interwoven network
of managing lives as community,
rather than one mind stretching to another
knowing how it feels to be alone.

I drank too, gave up exercise and sleep,
some would say these were destructive measures,
others might acknowledge it was a way to survive.

And with all those vices I numbed her,
the child who knew abandonment
as a mother, father, sister, bedfellow, self,
one who lived in the amygdala
but pretended to spend time with a cortex.

Now I read -
meets new needs,
I still don't sleep,
I still rarely walk
but that vice,
the one that was killing me
lives in a corner,
waiting, watching,
she stays --
I am soothed by it
and we go on,
quite predictably,
catching flies.