Marshmallow

Marshmallow

Marshmallow

Children who give into temptation and
eat the soft, white marshmallow are found later
to develop a severe lack of impulse control―why delay
gratification if gratification speaks back to you―suffering intense
desire for satiety, walkers witnessed me squatting in the ditch
pissing hot urine into my trainers then
staggering up the endless hill in wet knickers,
the dog lead around my neck and a crushed, empty packet―
acute chemical frisson―a text to myself read
don’t apologise to anyone. Dizzy, I wrote back,
no-one deserves front row seats to this. I alone give in as we are all voyeurs of our own
fluctuating, impermanent existences now.
I took pictures of the familiar landscape as it faded out new
on my cloudy, dying phone; I wanted to be spoken to,
not heard, and opiates made me itch until
my dirty skin was raised, red and
all over my back, my feet, my hands
the echo of unresponsive lovers―later, I sat
in the hospital bed making myself bleed ferociously,
unaddressed, unable to focus. When they discharged me
I scratched for three more days
and the scars added to an already extensive collection. a consciousness undeprived, twice removed
so I can see into it. The river swells
each year and we avoid the flood―sensation speaks to me
though I’m cataleptic on the grass before falling numb
over the stiles, unable to inhabit my white space and
vomiting on asphyxia. You only have to breathe in round here
to get high. Time unfulfils us. Temptation has dominion over us and
the junkies scour the car park in the early hours
for residue in used baggies. Time passes, fades and
God knows I don’t need the dregs of anyone else’s
unmastered proclivity. created the conditions in which I choose to
close my eyes; I created free will and
the very idea that a place can become
an induced coma. Heroin shoegaze in my headphones
is its own genre and I tiptoe around the Easter holiday
broken glass and the passive aggressive workers and
the unleashed drug-deal dogs that
circle around each future murder. The air
has a whiff of blood saturation and A-grade skunk, a
self-gratifying notion that perhaps a minor bloom
or transgression wouldn’t really hurt anyone,
least of all me.