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