CASUAL NOTES ON ADDICTION ❋ Mackenzie Matthew Perras

i move like a twitching dreamwalker
numb sleepy
blind anxious bundle
fearful of my own darker self
because i noticed
the weight of things
others wore without strain

memory comes back to me sometimes
usually at night, bro lonely
floats down from the moon like bits of ash
it’s a gossamer milk to be drunk in gulps
sticky dry as spider threads
and i’ve never been one to say no

so i remember your square teeth
bright music
or dogs swimming through tall blades of green
picnic tables, new cities wearing black rain and
slipping into a two-joint nap with argentine boys
phones ringing out like prayer gongs
or my mothers fur coat, fistfuls of perfume I could
bring up to my face
inhaling her night out
and madness comes,
not externally but appearing on the skin
as dew does,
memory and madness

everything looms, sinister street lamps mock me until
i give in,
take a swill of gin
and again and again and i breed a new high night
that falls like fire around me,
dark galaxies wreathed in glass
mutant dreams, the clear noise of tears that deafens
me to joy, guardian lakes churning up sediment
like sparkles from the bottom of time;
perfect amnesia eclipsing the stars
into moody blue silence
and the world expires on a single sigh,
willows braiding the wind

but then
spiteful, spiteful noises
reminding me i am human clay;
that my high must be maintained, delicately balanced
imprecise shifting slopes, cascades of neurochemical
reactions, unholy homeostatic pressures
maybe a doorframe clicks and
my muscles froth
frustration stirs a red fuck to my lips
balled fingers falling in tremors.
from a mouldy palace of burnt out suns
i fly through parking lots
onto speedy ribbons of highway
bleeding deaf tones from my gums
but
that’s not how the song’s supposed to go

blind as an eye shut dream walker
fooled by the flip logic of visions
so many mirages in my chest
that it seems normal to hunt that
sweet cream toffee smoke
juniper gin swill snorts, invisible genesis
of oblivion, tapping and tapping at a compass with a needle
guided by the track marks of dead men,
(burroughs, bukowski)
begging that i could be smacked into
breath like a new baby
but folded by small fingers
into defeat