In Search Of The Wonder Drug

The last vestiges of the powder remain.
The potent drug swirling in his head.
His eyes are dank and dark.
Not focussed anywhere at all.
His mind reeling to years gone by.
To dreams of days when nothing was right.
This isn't working, he thinks.
“I need more, I need something harder.
The dreams should disappear.
Let hallucinations take over.
Let blood gush swiftly out.
Let me keel over and fall.
The dreams must be gone.”

A moment and a syringe later.
“I can do anything.”
Creeps over to the edge of the precipice.
Looks down the side of his bed.
The tangle of clothes in a heap.
His shrouded mind rending then imperceptive.
Imagining the body resided in his nightmares.
A mortified face with a stoppered shriek.
His own scream cutting through the still night.
“The dreams must disappear.
The dreams must be gone.”

The myriad drugs piled up altogether.
Picking one an intensely tough decision.
The sanity of the mind to be preserved.
The nightmares to vanish.
Too demanding; much too painful.
He dies a slow, morbid death.
As the lethal drugs flow through his veins.
And his mind vanishes into
The powerless yet strengthening feeling.
The search for the wonder drug at an end.


“Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul.”

- Gregory David Roberts in Shantaram