In my evening phone call to the outer-limits, dialing into disaster somewhere on the road with my favorite death-partier and sometime partner in destruction, I got accused. I was accused, fairly or not, of pretending that I was better than him. That I was a fake, pretending that I’m not the trash that I clearly am, and will always be. That I was ‘better than I should be’. Of deserting the cause, the great escape(ism). That I was looking down on him, and had no right to.
So…from deep in the notebooks scrawled in brown ink because I thought it more stylish, in bloodsmeared pages dotted with the peel- off labels from rum bottles, I decided to own my previous debauchery from the time P.K. (pre kids), and drag out a couple of old druggie songs or poems, or whatever they think they might be at this point in time.
I’m no better than anyone else, and no one is better than me. I’m not wanting to cry on anybody’s shoulder about it. I still have my swagger. I’m not going to complain about my days trying to keep up with the boys in the bathrooms. I might even offer a sly raised eyebrow towards the junkie hero that is Mr. Richards, and call bullshit on his autobiographical insistence that he only ever muscled heroin, and never mainlined. Unicorns might exist, but a long term heroin addict with that level of control is the Beowulf of junkies. I’m happy to admit Keef might be just that.
I might not be proud of who I was. I might not be proud of the oxys and the morphine and whatever else came my way at later points, which I have also been free of for many years now. I’m not proud of The Poppy Pod Tea Saga. But I’m also not to chicken-shit to say, I did some hard travellin’, and I might even have had my own era where I romanticized junk. I don’t think there is an addict out there that hasn’t tipped their hat to Jim Carroll and yelled the words to “People that Died” while barreling down some highway or other.
Numb
The only thing that I know how to do
The only thing that I ask of you
Is to try and outrun our certain fate
Of loneliness promises
And Horse before my gate
And you know, we both chased the sun down
And you know we both chased that numb down
That double cross left scars on your chest
And those iron bar threats left scars in my head
And every day gets scarier yet
As we move closer to
As good as it gets
But you know we both chased that numb down
And you know we both chased the sundown.
Every day I look more of a wreck
And every minute you look sadder yet
And I wont get far with this broken head
And you won’t get far despite what you said
But we know we both chased that numb down
And we know we both chased that sundown
My resolved disappointments and your jagged tears
Your silent battles and my faded fears
Are nothing compared to this state of grace
Where we slide into the ditches
But yet nothing breaks
Cause you know we both chased that numb down
And you know we both chased that sundown
Not going to any great extremes was a bit of a joke
We travelled light years with just an ox and a yoke
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
But its hard to pin down two travelers in space
Cause we only know how we chased that sun down
And we only know how we chased that numb down
And as we drew lots for that last pillar of salt
We kept our eyes pinned….
To it wasn’t our fault
The tower fell as I made my escape
Superheroes don’t always wear capes
But you know how I chased that numb down
And you know how I chased the sun down
You tried to rewrite history and
Claim I was wearing your clothes
And said you divided the doses on the road
Bad guys they have no respect
Night falls in the day
And pigs haven’t flown yet
But I know how you chase that numb down
And I know how you chase that dumb-down
To all you comfortable spoilt consumers
The end of the world isn’t much to look forwards to
But to all the riders on this road
It’s all we’ve got left out here in the cold
They don’t know how it feels to chase that sun down
Or wake up and pray for that numb to come back around.