Image: My Own

A Poem About Addiction

and the story surrounding it.

So, I’ve made a bold decision — no, not rehab, I already did that in 2015 — to start revising and publishing my rather sizeable backlog of poetry.

For every poem that I publish, I will write a little bit about the context of the poem. Also, because for me the way a poem sits on a page is important, and because Medium has too much space between line-breaks, I have chosen to always use Word screenshots of my poems. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s an important aesthetic decision.

Today’s poem is a major one. After years of on and off heroin and other addictions, and of thinking I had it in control, it spiralled into an everyday thing. I decided to reach out for help at a state funded rehab program here in Lisbon, Portugal (which actually boasts one of the most statistically successful methods in Europe).

This poem was written and recorded at my friend’s recording studio, “Scratchbuilt” back in 2015. Conversely to most people, who get addicted when entering the music world, I decided to get clean. Go figure, right?

I had produced next to no writing during my “dark years,” and because for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, writing and music had re-entered my life on a daily basis, I wanted to honor that and do things a different way.