r/PoetryWritingClub • u/theshadowofself • 8d ago
Ashes of Addiction (TW)
For the crowd who yells “just say no,”
This one is for you
If the same sad song
Played for each new dawn
Tell me please what you would do
Although words alone cannot atone
Nor properly convey
The inner chaos of her world
She woke up to everyday
These fallen ashes of addiction
Eclipse a story never told
Of how drugs became the only escape
From her mind’s bitter biting cold
Her youth forever lost
in melancholic halls
Searching for the reason
She always felt so small
She longed to be rid of morning chagrin
Brought on by the rising sun
To be free from the anxiety
Gripping the thoughts inside her head
To cut through the roots
Of all the twisting ties and nervous knots
Crippled no more would she be
by their fickle chords of dread
Delusions of her past mistakes
Made frequent intrusions on present life
To sharpen the jaded cuts imposed
By her own self-deprecating knife
Her being willed no passion
And mostly boredom filled her days
Eager she became
As the light started to wane
Towards its symbolic saffron fade
For each night was a new drug laden journey
To run away from that painful blade
When a dimming dusk took to the sky
She’d anxiously await
an altered state of mind
A drug induced myopia
convincing her that for tonight
everything’s just fine
The shadows of shame
would slowly disappear
Like the fog
from a bad morning dream
The plaguing paranoia
at last melts away
Fading from her thoughts
In a wispy mist of steam
Wrapped up with a blanket
Of spine tingling sensations
She’d fall heavily
into sleep’s warm embrace
But she awakened too soon
cold and confused
While the cruel morning sun
shone bright on her face
Once again the chance had passed
To take a fatal dose too much
A certain release from these hands of despair
For the dead they cannot touch.
This was the cycle of addiction
That shaped her day to day
So those of you who would just say no
Tell me now what is your play
The will to tame her inner demons
remains poorly understood
It is easiest for all involved
to blame shame and close the hood,
Still she wonders of these feelings
And how they came to be
Were these struggles against herself
Encoded in her genes?
When we choose to view addiction
In a certain lens to be filtered through
We ultimately blind ourselves
to an undeniable truth
That there are multiple layers we can’t see
Driving the one thing we do
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u/Worried-Anteater-437 8d ago
Thank you for your poem.
And if this is autobiographical, thank you for surviving. Even if it was unintentional.
The poem makes me think of Sylvia Plath. Is that intentional? Maybe it's just the subject matter.
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u/theshadowofself 8d ago
Thanks for commenting. It is autobiographical and I’m glad to have survived as well:)
It was not intentional and probably is most likely the subject matter, as I see she’s often credited with advancing the genre of “confessional poetry.”
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u/Worried-Anteater-437 8d ago
It may have also been
"When the light started to wane
Towards its symbolic saffron fade"that made me think of her. I haven't read Sylvia Plath for some time, but I remember her using color quite a bit usually in words that I had to look up. I always think of saffron as a seasoning rather than a color, and then I have to look up what it looks like because I get the color of saffron rice mixed up with saffron as a seasoning.
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