Don’t Be Like Them
Everything is exaggerated on television
Brought to the point of glamour
Symptoms need to be seen to exist
Addicts need to be scratching their hair
Physically pining for the next score of their choosing
To an extent this is true
Not in the beginning though
In most cases it’s a long road to addiction
And too often we blame the victims
Would you know if you wee addicted to something
That question is rhetorical
Because all too often it’s not the substance that drives us
It’s the unseen that the substance seeks to remove, or multiply
Do you think the dizzy spell after the first cigarette is pleasurable?
Did you even know that it happened?
Yet somewhere within this fragile body
The chemistry has changed
A return to the normal is out of the question
I once watched an expert on the brain describe her stroke
The various shutdowns, reboots and non sequitur pathways
That overpowered her normal brain functions
Knowledge that was, before then, unknown
And only realized with the power of hindsight
Because she lived through her ordeal
Most of us are not experts on the brain
‘Dopamine levels shot up’ is not an adequate explanation
No matter how cool it sounds out loud
There is no daily journal we can transcribe our body’s chemistry in
So we’re only left with a strange feeling
Want, need — call it what you will
It cannot be measured
