the one about drugz

the abuse of drugs !  

an everlasting dance with devil and folly ?

   men have been architects of altered consciousness
   since men barely existed

   and, before the age of industrialization,
   a problem barely existed, but now so does 

            * * *

in the rugged badlands above Persian Empire the Sun  
and Ottoman Empire the Moon, where Scythes
and Huns and Sarmates once reigned, there are still
half-steed-half-man tribes boiling dry leaves of cannabis
and other steppe-herbs with an iron bowl in an enclosure,  
and the smoke rises from the bowl and hexes the congregants
into a warm, deep, lulling drone of cannabine stupor

   psychedelic vortices gloaming all around them !

   psychotomimetic gyrations turn into spiral warps
   penetrating even a thickness as the human mind

my pipe of hashish rests on my night-stand beside me…
seductress-demons of my Danteesque visions and worlds !

     take me home ! –
     i lay down my weapons again !

                 where is
                 my damn pipe ! ! !  

 vaporizers of dangerous Amanita life-forms
 in proto-medieval Upplandic pastures and Shamanic woodlands !

 chewers of the Kat in the slums of Mogadishu !  
 devoted followers of Great Toad God Bufo !
 and devotional congregants of the Ya Ba eucharist
 in the slums of Bangkok !

    Parisian starry absinthe nights !
    the warm opium fever, the red wine revelations
    and exotic leaves of cannabis and tobacco…
    Finnish vodka in a sauna and brännvin on midsummer’s eve !
    Moroccan desert dunes, the foothills of the Atlas  
    and eternal Afghan plains of wild ganja…

    Guangzhou dens of tobacco and opium
    and Sonoran drylands of all cacti and toads…

    Gabonese iboga lands of shrub and lichen
    and by Andean foothills, the verdure coca groves abound...

        like vultures are we all upon these treasuries...
        insectile, clustering, swarming !
        our hands breaching, clawing
        upon the gates of artificial paradise

     there are many venoms, ills, spites and curses
     weaponized by the lizard of addiction

  i ponder whether i should stop this doped folly once and for all,
  as i lose myself again in dazing fumes of nitrous oxide
  in a proud Jamesian tradition !
   
   stinky caravans of destitute Hashish-flamers
   disappear above the curvature of the earth

    i once belonged to them ! and vomit gropes my bellum…

     i now hurl curses and spites against
     the inebriated mass which moves all around me,
     but of which i am undeniably myself a part !

   all the lusts and the sins and the vices !

   ten-thousand shames, regrets and hatreds,
   pains and torments and anguished despairs –
   the fungi from which the parasite ever feeds !

          it goes never hungry !
   the allurements of the imps of Satan
   coaxing the sorry human soul into the darkness !

   accursed truants of life itself they become,
   swallowed by the needle ocean, deep and cold…