Runaway Train

I snorted myself awake- how romantic

I dream of running, stealing, being stolen

faces of people familiar and yet not the same.

Our house dank and dark and multistoreyed

and I am riveted on cue as students parade round and I am trying to find any order

some order

to this madness.

CRC the door so you can step in easier

breeze through

and I’ll be waiting

book in hand

dreams on standby

snort.

I was thinking yesterday about those times as a late teen.  Times when I had one foot either side of the sanity fence.  We have all probably been there, but mine was such a huge part of that time- rolling  across five years- that I wonder if that madness ever truly leaves.

I thought about those friends, now dead and buried, that I thought of so fondly as family but who didn’t quite care enough to stand by me when I was having a bad trip.  The same friends who paid me in p, who would slip me a tab or half an E as their way of being kind. The sex, scandel, the laughter and music.  At the time we were all so caught up in the madness, that we never noticied us all losing bits of ourselves.

Work.  After two nights of no sleep and countless lines and smoking up a storm in our trusty p pipe;  I lay in the sickbay my heart drumming so fast I was panting and drenched with sweat- I realised that my life could either end right here and now like this or I could make a break for it.

I went to China.  As far as I dared run.  And even after I came back, I didn’t really.  I moved towns, moved lives, became someone responsible, stable.  Those I had left behind slowly died, fell to pieces and became obsolete.

Now seven years later I realise I still miss those times, the feel of rain on my face as we danced down K road, the peels of laughter as we sat in the warehouse in Onehunga, talking all night about nothing and everything, rolling up another $20 bill.  I miss that insanity.  And maybe, just maybe, even as my life resumes responsibly, I am still straddling that fence.