To quiet down the noise inside a shattered, heavy mind, I built a cage of chemicals and left the world behind. It wasn't where the trauma lived,that started long before, Addiction was just the armour, a lock upon the door.
It works at first, it numbs the riot, it blots out every trace, Until it takes the wheel and strips the colour from your place. Where family, health, and all you care for drops into a haze, And money and the fix rule the long nights and the days.
You fight your way out through the mud, you claw across the line, You build a life of health and age, a remodelled, new design. Yet decades later while you sleep, the nightmares still take breath, You wake up drenched in sudden sweat and cold, familiar death.
You’re reaching out for phantom gear, you're bracing for the shake, Convinced the rattle's coming back before you fully wake. Then slowly, through the fog and fright, as memory fades and blurs, And whispers that it's over now, after all these many years.
But the echo stays beneath the skin, a ghost that will not yield, A terror born of needles when a simple vein's revealed. A pill you take for healing feels like walking into traps, Your nervous system bracing, for a sudden, dark relapse.
You pass the ones who stayed behind, grown older, worn, and sick, A mirror of the alternate path where time ran thin and quick. A living window backward, to the road you didn't take, A stark and brutal measure of the world that you forsake.
The memories drift like passing smoke, untethered and surreal, A stranger’s past where nothing in the distance touches real. The price was high, the war was long, the shadows still remain, A phantom chain that never leaves, the imprint in the brain.
I write unfiltered, raw and brutally honest poetry and prose on trauma, survival and living with BPD and OCD, which I’ve had since childhood.
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