Mom said some people get hooked after just one time.
Granted, it wasn’t just the gateway stuff done five minutes
before class that everyone was doing in high school.
The first time I experienced it was late one night after
an emotionally ravaging day, in room-provided solitude,
eye-contact with a hummingbird silence.
Deafening heartbeats, injecting the day’s events into my
bloodstream. Hypothalamus overload, delusional parasitosis—
words crawling just
under the skin, pausing at my fingertips
expressed through a cracked
shaky #2.
Ten minutes of ultimate inspiration, ultimate confidence;
euphoria, sweet euphoria, meet the brain.
A god for a single moment. Fifty thousand words,
fifty million thoughts, infinite possibilities. And yet
you? You granted life to a breathtaking new combination.
Addiction.
I get it now. Every night I crave to reintroduce myself to
that divine creator living deep, deep within myself,
but many of these nights end with restless, sweaty
palms, and ravenous appetite for syntax that isn’t being
fed.
The words again course through my veins, surge
through exhausted gray matter but I can’t. I can’t get
them out. They burn inside me and some days you have to
itch and scratch at
them until you bleed them onto the paper.
It’s a dripping mess, kindergarten finger-painting on
cardstock.
Honesty in its purest form accompanied by increased body
temperature and pupils dilated twice their normal size,
courtesy of the dim desk lamp everyone buys for college.
And I admit it, I’m always looking for new ways to
reach the feeling of that first time. Speedballing syllables
with rhythm, I’m just a delinquent in downtown LA.
