Day 78 Morning - There Is Such Shame In Admitting The Truth Of What Is Happening To Me Now And What I Did To Myself In The Past And The Nightmare-like Consequences

I do not know if I will have the whatever that is needed - it is something like courage, but it is not so noble and it is also a violation and it will hurt those that love me - to actually publish this entry. There is so much shame as I come to the end of what has been perhaps the worst night of my life. It is so different to experience this insanity while knowing that I am sober and so far away from the drugs. When I was smoking cocaine on a daily basis, at the very least, I could explain away this insanity as cocaine psychosis. But I have no such crutch to lean on today as the side effects of these Hepatitis C drugs bring forth - like the cracking of the Seventh Seal brings forth hell on earth in Christian mythology - not only this diabolical rash that itches all night long, but a serenity-shattering flashback to the swarm of imaginary bugs everywhere.

Scratching the Itch Ignites the Flashback Firestorm of Invisible Bugs

I am not a bad person. I made terrible, indulgent mistakes, and I hurt myself and the ones I love. I have tried so hard to come back from that abyss, and I have changed the fabric of my life, but it seems like the greater tapestry remains the same. It seems like I cannot escape the horror of my past. It does more than haunt my dreams. It infects my waking with sensations of a physical insanity that I cannot stop. As I try to cure myself of this disease, the side effects of the treatment trigger a return to the past insanity of cocaine psychosis and result in these sensational flashbacks that are driving me to the very brink of sanity. I cannot sleep and my head spins with fantabulous stories of invisible bugs and I find myself back at the place I never wanted to be again. It is like an unwilling return to the circle of hell from which I thought myself reprieved, but the devil is laughing as he punches my ticket and tells me that there is no escape. Behold the horror as the delusion of being a child of the Inferno has returned and this moment is without mercy.

My Return to the Inferno is not as a Visitor but Reduced to a Resident Again!

If I showed you a picture of my right knee, I am almost sure that you would turn away and never want to look again. The splotch of red is not like a rash, but more like a plague exemplified in color and tone. There is a sense that if you look at it too long, it might happen to you as well. It has that certain unnerving quality that sucks in your gaze like a splotchy vortex of reflective ugliness. It looks like an infection that wants to spread and is searching for the ways and means of survival.

At this very moment, I feel like less than a human being. I feel like I just want this all to be over. I feel like I have fallen, and I do not know how to return to that imaginary path that leads to the illusion of my redemption. Once again, as I did in the past, I am fetishizing the forsaken because I can find no other explanation that justifies the petty and squalid nastiness of this condition. Why has it come to this?

Have you ever been possessed by an image? I dance with the bounty of Google images, and I find this picture of my condition that is described as thus on the deviant art website...  And from the ashes and the dust of the end of existence, the Pistachio God arose to create a reality where anything can exist... and what this Demented God chose to create is the tortured man with the endless itch that can never be reached. And I cannot believe that I actually identify with such an image of abomination...

Frightening that Such an Image of Itching can be Found

It remains one of the saddest realities of my life as a poet that perhaps my greatest long poem tells the tale of the bugs and this horror. It is called the last story and I have only read it a few times to people because it reveals such horror in such intimate detail. What I love about the work is that it does not romanticize the drugs and the Naked Lunch and the Burroughs bullshit in the slightest, but simply reveals all the ugliness and all the insanity of being caught in the depths of cocaine psychosis. It is the worst horror I ever experienced, and I am cursed today to be having such flashbacks caused by these damn side effects. I do not know how much longer I can take it. I do not know if I can go on.

Here is the poem and I am sorry to reveal this putrid ugliness and I know that the bugs no longer need and I am free of the slavery of that addiction but why is it happening today and can this poor boy who is beyond middle age and should act like the man he is but still in the stillness of this morning can he and can I be forgiven again... John

the last story

I

this is the only story i have left to tell,

all others lost in the white smoke of extermination.

i will tell my story of today and of a thousand days past.

it will be told and it will die and never be told again.

there are microscopic flesh-eating bugs in my brain,

the parasites of addiction flourish in the flames.

they rise with the smoke and attack in concert

each human orifice, hiding in clothes and shadow,

immune to spray and water, they swarm the body.

have i gone insane? will tonight ever end?

will tomorrow be the same?  can i stop?

there was a boy who entered the club of man

through violence, not a sweet killing song,

but the oration of sudden forever self-destruction.

i have seen night pass into cruel morning,

the exhaustion of those who cannot sleep,

bones mocked, flesh ringing, eyes closed open;

nothing will ever be normal again.

you laugh. you are bored. you wonder why.

you judge the proceedings after the sentence

for i have chosen the cage a thousand times.

i have done everything to myself

i would never do to others.

i have warned my friends of deeds

i welcomed the night before.

i am the hypocrite on a chosen stake.

i am a modernist, i am a rebel, i am soon dead.

i am a lifestyle of the rich and famous.

i am a vanity fair advertisement.

i am calvin klein raping the children. 

i am the kali yuga in all her glory and all her excrement.

i am falling for two thousand years and cannot say why.

i am lost.

this is shit. i have been reduced to writing shit.

i already wrote the great poems about my addiction.

did that.  done this.  better and bigger and more beautiful before.

now pathetic, on the cross of my own making, and empty.

i swear to crack i once was a poet of some potential.

so much lies on the tip of my tongue.  the speaking swirls.

i have danced to the song so many many times before.

everything awkward and over-practiced.

mechanical hell.

performed and purified in the ritual habit profaned.

this is the land between the third and seventh circles,

the harpies hovering,  the three-headed dog below.

in the limbo of the second ring i learn the arts

of slow solitary chunks torn from my living soul.

did i pass through the dark woods? 

did i pay the boatman as your life passed me by?

did i notice the passing tides of the river black?

did i arrive? did i visit in order to know?  did i die?

did i look back upon my love and live forever

alone in the smoke of fools, hours of no return?

if you will, may i please avoid the ending?

can i end a solo tragedy on a happy note?

o my lord and o my soul and o the universe alone,

can i be redeemed?!

the bugs want to know.

for bad behavior,

i extended my sentence for two more years.

i have to go downtown now.

i don't want to upset the warden.

he controls the bugs, he knows my name;

i might be in the hole forever and a day.

what was my crime?  what was worth the cost?

i was born, wasn't i?  i live on the planet earth.

i am jewish and once told my mother to fuck off.

i fucked women i didn't like.  i ignored the phone.

i stole sunglasses from seven different airports.

is that not enough?  fuck, i was born.

II

incessantly driven to destruction,

a self-created inescapable loss

ringing in each new second

with the evil becoming a need,

irrevocable, no hope to stop.

there is a vise of my own making,

the dopamine in my head is dead,

the superHIGHway under demolition.

can i live again on a country road?

take me home to what i was before.

father, why have i forsaken myself?

this is true.

i dream my mother is an addict,

stockpiling dilaudids and vicadins

in the back bathroom, locking the door.

as sneaky as her, i steal a bottle.

i'm startled to discover the quality,

the very best pharmaceutical shit.

i take two pills i have never taken before

with the smile of a new frontier crossed.

before they hit, upon confrontation,

i tell my mother betty ford waits for us

at rancho mirage. we won't tell the father

or the husband or the family with fingers.

our secret sins to be overcome together,

vanquished without the eyes of the world.

in reply, she snarls, demanding the drugs.

the stain spreads. 

mother, why have i forsaken you?

III

there are lightning bolts of joy

in darkest of days, hidden and unsuspected.

how sweet the moment

when sidewalk apparition of a dead bird

becomes the reality of an autumn leaf fallen.

sometimes we fall because it is the season.

like the immortals, i have had my stay in hell.

even in the stench of my own flesh burning,

there exists the promise of redemption.

i have drunk from black rivers of death,

celebrating acid scorching my belly,

but many rivers run through my life.

i know the future rises like a tide.

i shall not ebb unto death.

there is a wave coming,

water to be walked on.

since the beginning,

this i have known.

can you see the snake in the thicket?

it lies and lies and lies in wait

for the passing foot in the mouth

to decode, to implode, to fold the sweaty shit at four corners,

make the bed neat and tidy in morning, nobody knows nothing,

nobody knows vile revelation, nobody knows my truth.

hide the sheets of no salvation now,

pretend to eat breakfast on the phone,

welcome the snake, open every door.

i have my fingers exploring every orifice for the bugs.

in the ear, in the mouth, up the anus, up the urethra,

both eyes possible invasion points to the brain like calais,

but the nostrils are normandy, they will land in my nose.

hard to see up each nostril, beyond warning flesh flap,

into soft places where the feast of damnation lasts forever.

i cannot be the home of bugs, they creepy crawl all over me,

i cannot fall to a storm of hallucination. the bugs, the bugs,

the bugs are real. 

will call the exterminator in morning or more like afternoon

when i wake with bright windows blackened, a simulacra

of morning and my shower and coffee and donut and paper

all reassure me of normality, bugs forgotten (hidden, lurking),

need no pest control, no rehabilitation for the parasite of life,

there exist no gross infestations in my world so fuck off for now,

my brain working real good, baby, no banquet for tiny teeth,

make a call or two, look busy for a couple of hours, time to score.

there are lightning bolts of lies

in brightest of days, open and quite suspected.

IV

do you like pyrotechnics?  fireworks?  the big bang?

do i entertain? does despair focus a wandering gaze?

you may ask the destination of a man with bleeding eyes

but sometimes i cannot disguise my perfect exhaustion

of never ending, never going to end, never to end today.

today is over and long past and tomorrow has become today,

the tug-of-war, the merry-go-round, the wheel-of-birth.

find an image, pick a metaphor, exhume your favorite corpse,

anything to keep from moving in an eventual direction,

i feel more than anything in the cold the stark eventuality.

to come back to these words on a daily basis,

to avoid sobbing in the chest uncontrollably,

to whisper sweet nothings to young girls,

to spread cream cheese and eat a plain bagel,

to rise from the shroud and breathe again.

i must go on.  it is impossible.  i must go on.

if only beckett had been a drug addict and written,

if only kafka had been a drug addict and written,

if only shakespeare had been a drug addict and written,

then and only maybe and mediocre, i could say this.

must finish the section before taking one more ride.

can you imagine the resurrection of the umbilical cord,

beyond rotten, risen in shades, silently reconnected,

not to nourish, but to drain all that was given in love,

to empty the vessel leaking of value and tossed aside.

V

in vast silences of every night,

i shuffle and wash and smoke and wipe my brow.

everything peeling snakeskin, raw surfaces,

skin dry and flaking, sour blood in my ear,

ashes to ashes, dust to dust, flesh to flesh,

there are particles of death everywhere.

i need to explain.

i need to understand.

i need to redeem.

i need to forget.

i need to destroy.

i need to forgive.

i need to silence.

my eyes transformed into electron microscopes.

i can see the horror of invisible creatures,

feasting on the banquet of human beings.

they are the rulers of the world.

we are supermarkets.

i am being eaten alive.

speared from mouth to anus,

driven to the flaming spit,

shrouded in coals and fire,

eyes popping like glass,

heart boiled, stewed,

eaten on an altar,

regurgitated

in time.

something has to break.

VI

the body broken,

blood and spirit shed,

the story told.

now please if i will,

may we return.

return to visit

return to live

return to love

return to die

i guess -  i hope -  i fear -  i know

forgive me friends and lovers,

the bugs still need,                          

                                        i gotta go —