‘Last Dance’ – A Recovery Poem

I was high as the sky
Under an illusion I had wings and could fly.
But in truth I was merely a lifeless mannequin detached from reality
Governed by the voices of my own insanity.

I tried to take control but all it did was make the chaos escalate
Robbing, dealing, violence, guns -nothing I could premeditate.
In an empty room with a pipe, masschette and broken down door
I sat nonchalantly on the floor.

My skinny broken face staring in the mirror thinking
How I was on a descent to madness and my existence was slowly shrinking.
Illusory voices never seen but always heard
My world was a war-torn paradise and my vision was completely blurred.

What remained real was a nebulous cloud of drug-induced amnesia
And from this frightening, deep psychosis there exists no anaesthesia.
I stood at deaths door but I never got handed the key
7 times I had to OD until it opened my eyes to see.

That maybe I had no control over how much I put inside of me
I wasn’t just flirting with the borders of my limitation
But I was suffocating holding the grips of a constant resuscitation.

Forever carrying the pain of my past and the guilt of my original sin,
A deeply hidden, silent killer, never surfacing but lurking beneath my skin.
Manifesting inside me and insipidly corroding my soul.
All these years I concealed it but now it was finally taking a toll.

Proliferating in strength every time I fought it with suppression
Conversely forcing me into a deeper depression.
So badly abused I became an embodiment of my own abuser
A traumatised innocent child now an everyday drug user.

Obsessed with the idea that happiness existed outside me
Utilising every element of external stimuli I could get to some degree.
Desperately grovelling at the transient payoffs of instant gratification
leaving me with nothing but a reoccurring mental fixation.

Incessantly taunted by evanescent moments of satisfaction
Diverting from my real predicament it worked as a perfect distraction
But these ventures of externally acquired joy would never sustain
And it’s the emptiness I always felt that would just remain.

I was hiding behind a mask of a plastic gangsta
A clown, a criminal, a genius, a pranksta.
All just protecting the pain of a young girl
losing her identity with every breath of a methylated twirl.
Until I was granted the gift of desperation
That I was able to gain perspective a synthetic separation.

The illusion of my self-sufficiency blinding me
from seeing that the victim and culprit was actually me
The narrow lenses of my own excessive vanity
Was keeping me doing laps of my own insanity.
Recovery ruptured my ego that I used for protection
It really was a block blinding me from seeing my own progression.

I was left striving for an unattainable perfection
My own destructive form of perpetual rejection.
But believing that there is a power greater than me
Was the surrendering that set me free.
Impeding on my narcissism
So I listened to someone else for once without cynicism.

I took a step back and saw things from a different perspective
That I wasn’t my thoughts and my view was now objective.
Having this awareness was really the key
to realise that all along peace existed inside of me.

Yet the pain I inflicted on other people during addiction
Was a struggle, a constant affliction.
The guilt and the shame
Is a consequence I can’t disclaim
I was stuck because I didn’t know how to make amends
But I know the way forward now is to never do it again.

So I was prisoner inside fabricated walls in my own mind
Searching for peace I was unable to find
But these walls have now fallen away
Leaving me vulnerable; a stronger pathway.

It’s true the devil once had a hold of me
But now I have a choice of who I going to be
With all the near fatalities and crumbled realties.
I know this is the final dance,
And to have it with the devil I won’t be taking that chance.