drifting back

By Stephen J House

murky memories slide in daily
about my muddled stint
here last time
i grasp on
fearful
but well
-prepared
wasted
in a run
-down bar
every
-night for a month
a twisted fling with the main dancer
from the twenty

-four hour club
days on ecstasy with the thai guy
and not leaving his bed for a week
and a passing friendship with a depressed painter who i’ve heard has killed himself
and how one dusk we sat on a silvery lake
in a broken boat
drinking whisky from the bottle
smoking weed
and making up poems about our deep sadness
in the very there of then
and these hazy fragments i decipher
through anxious bouts of reflection
crawl closer bit by bit
i thought they had vanished forever
and a single tear dances down my cheek
as a messy recollection of waking up in a dirty gutter
savagely appears
shocks to remind me
makes me flush burning hot
and if you’ve never jumped on a train
of indulgent destruction to escape your mind in turmoil
and lost everything to a washy game of anarchy
punctuated with humiliating dysfunction
you can never understand
about drifting back
slowly and gradually
and drifting back
is what i’ve done since then
i think

pexels-photo-999074

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