I want to leave

another permanent mark

on my skin, to feel the pulse

under the knife today,

tonight, when it is the hour

of understanding, of dismissed life.

I watched his mouth open wide

forming a sentence as the background

of clamour threatened

with deep joy to stutter any conversation

we might have had,

I leaned my head forward, slightly,

and cupped

my empty hand to my ears as if

to show his words had been mislaid

in the pulse of ether

and wondering who the fuck he was.

He smiled, then yelled above the noise,

So how do you get high, man?

Through listening to vinyl Lamb

I replied, my head half smashed with my latest

attempt that night to die on Broadway,

cigarette? I enquired, and flicked

the end of the packet so that two or three

poked their soldier heads

above the parapet.

He held out his hand and waved them off,

a rebuke-like termination

of the offer.

Man, I get high to a different tune; but thanks, he added

as if the refusal would offend.

How do you get high,

how do you release the pain

of our futile and sterile existence Dude?,

the man at my shoulder asked,

unaware that he was now having

a conversation with the Devil

on my shoulder, Kerouac inflamed

and drinking straight from the bottle,

having removed the top with the flick

of a forked tongue.

No answer, my Devil just stared

at him, slightly drunk, wondering

in the back of his impish mind,

just how he could pluck

the courage to kiss the angel that hung

on the other side of the bar,

all stockings and black-belt glare.

Finding no joy in selling wares,

the man slouched off, the needle rejected,

not interested in getting high,

not when there is a rapid river

raging in me, wondering

where to cut a slice of flesh

and dig deep between my veins,

the trickle of blood as it travels

up the grooves of the knife,

more alluring on metal, than the false heed

of needle stacks.

 

Ian D. Hall 2018