The Drugs Got You Into This
A Poem
The drugs go into throat via expression, through need, torsion sickness, the screwing up of the eyebrows, disgust the most identifiable feeling in this new swamp of agony, what you stand
up for the timebeing, the time you had come out to play with clothes you’d never imagined you would own, didn’t know how to parcel out care for things like that, didn’t sound the stellar alarms at every lurch
down Portage Ave, all the parking gone, vanished or banished, who can say, you open up to the mud and the vomit lazing around you, calling dogs, calling for the street cleaners, their funny little pads
dumb looking haircuts shag leading them all the way down the bricked sidewalk in front of Portage Place, and you’d completely forgotten where home is or how to call a cab, or even having ten left over
to go the five blocks you’re mostly sure you’d have to go, swing past Second Cup, go Graham smack grill-first into big Hudson’s Bay window, so you stop and sit on the planters
feel your pocket for last half-crushed cigarette and find a distance to stare into.
J.D. Harms 2021
