Missionary girl reports that Chinese addicts say
your heart begs you to stay away
even while your legs are carrying you back.
After the merry little jitter of the filter
and the smack dancing in the spoon, after
the absorbed, childlike, assassin-like procedure —
citric, water, flame — I’ m back in the basement,
heartsick, digging for a vein in February
as in a February gone and a February
still to come, spitting prayers through the tourniquet
between my teeth, licking up tears and pleading
for my blood to plume up in the barrel, please
blossom up, squid-ink, blood-anemone
in the works — though you can have all that and miss,
or pull out and find you’ d had a vein, now “pissing
blood” — Deano’ s words as his gray fringe smeared across
his forehead, as he missed and bled and raged
to get it IN. Blood: thank Christ. Spit out
the tie, inject the welling gratitude
that flushes pleasure through the grief —
for the help and hope of friends
sold out, for all her loving years —
all of it driven down before one flood,
one gut-bracing stealth of warmth. Ah
well: restorative as sunshine to a snake.
So around the days and seasons
the junkies go — you might as well accelerate
us till our days and nights are strobing by —
use, cluck, raise, score, use, cluck, raise —
lantern-show flicker of tail-chasing, nameless days
spent waiting, cheating, waiting, struggling to outrun
the burn-and-freeze and — maybe worse —
the waking up to all that’ s lost: her happiness,
her younger years, the child she might have had.