The Fix

I spoon syllables from the gutter behind my teeth,
taste rust and rotted tokens,
then smear them across the white like graffiti made from charcoal splinters.

The pen coughs – no ink, just air and a faint screech
like a sticking hinge refusing to forget the door it once belonged to.
Each play is a twitch in the eye of God,
one lid fluttering against the migraine of meaning.

I’m snorting lines of stanzas, black cocaine scraped
from the margins of grocery receipts and unpaid tickets.
Buzz like a live wire jammed into the gums,
lightning fizzing in molar base,
nouns detonating behind my eardrums.

It’s not art – it’s withdrawal made visible,
costly and twitchy, a muscle misfiring in public.
I smoked the last metaphor like it was the final cigarette
before the blazing squad opened their dumb, red mouths.

You want aphrodisiac?
Try enjambment that splits the pelvis of silence.
Try verbs that don’t blink when the lights come on.
Try stumbling into a phrase so sharp
you shave ten years off your sanity holding it still.

Memory’s a stammer I can’t correct.
A cracked sidewalk monologue where each slab
is another version of me, misspelled and grinning.
I’ve found potash in my pillow seams,
lye in my tea leaves,
and poison where I meant to put praise.

Still, I feed the furnace.
Still, I chew the vowels down to pulp.
Ambrosia tastes like typewriter ribbon and bloodied knuckles reaching for wet coins.
The high isn’t ecstasy – it’s erosion.
A slow scrape of self across the teeth of a sentence
too honest to revise.

And yet I return,
drawn to the page like a hound to a cold,
bloodless trail
not for the scent,
but for the hope that something
is still running.