Hair like tumbleweed.
Fingers tremble like keys on a player piano
As I fumble my way through my debit card number.
Three day funk, smell of spent dopamine,
Bouts of excessive sweating and stale blankets.  

The dealer never judges; she sees me at my lowest,
Skin clammy as a baby bird’s, I walk on fault lines
Landmined with egg shells.
That makes our exchanges more intimate than sex,
Better than sex—no touch required—
Our little secrets—no one else knows my commitment
To my little hobby— The most intimate relationship I’ve ever had.  

Skull hookahs, neon oases, weakened pulses mainline
Dance beats that throb from some unidentified source,
Detoxing junkies wiggle those hips, twerk,
Get their groove on with beats
That camouflage their tremors,
A guy in the back revives the Macarena—  

The upright skeleton at the Hydroxy-7 case
Shakes with such force he comes apart,
Femurs unglued from hips,
Ribs strewn almost radially around the heap,
Disembodied hair absurdly resumes its greasy part.  

His fiancé witnesses it all on video chat—
They were conferring on brand and dose
When it happened; her screams conveyed
The terror of a lost fix, louder and louder, such force
Until she oozed gelatinously through
The screen, ectoplasm squirming past
The bones of her broken lover toward  

The glass case’s reflective glean—
A hand extends partially from the slop
Like Adam reaching out for God
On the chapel’s ceiling, recreated
On the burnished tile of the Capitalist temple.