It’s the little things
that sometimes
make the difference in our lives

It’s the little things
that can annoy
or can help us to survive

And I’ll come across
each little thing
and to dismiss it would be wrong

because those little things
can make it easy
to feel like I belong

For it is materialism
that makes me seem
I want to go

It is the way
to take a life
and produce it like a show

Put on the face
put on the performance
and take it to the road

Let it find an audience
who’d appreciate
but never know

what fully
there can be left
to try to comprehend

I will endure
the battle scars
just to find one good friend

Mind numbs
with the invasion of the chemical;
altered states have lodged
in this wry child-like mind

with delight.

Gleefully roaming the cerebral depths and
wreaking their blissful havoc,
they impose their haunting visions,
and numb the control of a mind thirsty for
some other reality.

But the realities have not changed–
only the perceptions of them.
The invader still lurks;
the pain still hurts,
but no longer is perceived
as such,
and relieved of reality
the mind must
bend to contentment.

I explore strange mirth and loves;
actions take
on their new meanings,
and the body sets about
it’s healing,
taking
and revealing
another way to perceive,
another method of relief.

With thanks and a
desperate leap,
I sigh a breath
of joyous nature’s doing,
gasping for the gases
that would be this medicine’s undoing,
and thus am forced
to lift the veil
and the lonely travail
of a joy I have known.

Of a pain still there
without my knowing.

I blame no one
and should prepare
for whatever dangers lie ahead.
For death is just
another way
to perceive a reality
that to some,
in dreams,
must by its
very nature
seem to be

just another perspective
of reality

just as is that to which this drug
has introduced me:

just another perspective
of reality.

A reality where the
physical takes on new dimension,
and the mind lay in a process of expansion.
But medicine a drug,
wears off in time;

death takes a more permanent line.

Having tasted one version of this reality
the one where pain ravaged uncontrollably,
and one in which no pain takes toll,

I wonder about the next in which I’ll know
a version of reality
where from all pain and bodies and medicine
I will be free.

A passing that, inevitably,
all shall come to know,

a part of our spirit’s growth.

A part of me.

Recovery:
It’s a process
biological
but that process
more psychological than most
would be willing to admit;

The organism in which
my consciousness is seated
has had it’s very health
depleted;

but how intertwined the body is
with this mind
and how I must
take a higher mental path
away from detrimental
tasks

to allow the body
to recuperate,
free from the mind’s
interfering ways.

I need to at once
extirpate
the thoughts
that provide a hindrance
to the organism’s
deliverance
back to that state of health.

the organism
that is this body
had already been invaded by
my mind

it did not need this
second incursion
by an organism of
much more primitive kind

whose deadly effects
would spare no-one
except for those
who have become one
a body and a mind
working together
harmony
redefined as healing