Cocaine.

(after a famous poem by Nina Cassian) 

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you
that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening
like carp-mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear
your blood singing though your genitals,
your nipples and your brain;

and you’ll feel sunbeams sliding
across your eye like the glitzy train
of a Hollywood dress. For the first time
you’ll be aware of gravity
like a rusty nail in your foot,
and your shoulder-blades will ache
for want of silly wings.

Call yourself alive? I promise you
that you’ll be deafened
by desert dust and filmy things
falling on the wormy furniture.
You’ll feel your eyebrows turning into two gashes,
and every false memory you have
will begin a sickening vibration of eyelashes,
a false regeneration.  

Call yourself alive ? When we die we join
yet another queue, a line
signposted Utter Devastation.

some poems by Nina Cassian >

on psycho-active drugs >