Digging

Missionary girl reports that Chinese addicts say

After the merry little jitter of the filter

and the smack dancing in the spoon, after

the absorbed, childlike, assassin-like procedure—

citric, water, flame—I’m back in the basement,

heartsick, digging for a vein in February

as in a February gone and a February

still to come, spitting prayers through the tourniquet

between my teeth, licking up tears and pleading

for my blood to plume up in the barrel, please

blossom up, squid-ink, blood-anemone

in the works—though you can have all that and miss,

or pull out and find you’d had a vein, now “pissing

blood”—Deano’s words as his gray fringe smeared across

his forehead, as he missed and bled and raged

to get it IN. Blood: thank Christ. Spit out

the tie, inject the welling gratitude

that flushes pleasure through the grief—

for the help and hope of friends

sold out, for all her loving years—

all of it driven down before one flood,

one gut-bracing stealth of warmth. Ah

well: restorative as sunshine to a snake.

So around the days and seasons

the junkies go—you might as well accelerate

us till our days and nights are strobing by—

use, cluck, raise, score, use, cluck, raise—

lantern-show flicker of tail-chasing, nameless days

spent waiting, cheating, waiting, struggling to outrun

the burn-and-freeze and—maybe worse—

the waking up to all that’s lost: her happiness,

her younger years, the child she might have had.