I need my next fix.

I need the needle to come gently down

and give me an escape route out of what could be

a boring existence,

if not for my not so-secret vice.

 

The odd burning cigar still lingers here.

Long gone is the bitter recrimination of a pint savoured and destroyed

and the gentle relaxation of something intangible

has not been taken for a while

as my friend in Oxford I haven’t seen.

 

I need my latest fix.

I first visited the dealer on my own far too young.

I handed over my hard won pocket money inside

a Woolworths on the High Street in King’s Heath

and from there I became a regular user, a junkie.

 

This is a disease, but I love it beyond comprehension.

I remember every single first fix in every form.

I tasted illicitness with a self satisfied pleasure

when school friends passed me a strange package

with the goods hidden inside a box of innocent looking tapes.

 

I sit here even now, I have only just put the needle

on the side and yet  something siren-like calls me to do

another hit before I sleep sweat drenched, oily skin

black driven, hit the heights, feel calm and secure

pulse racing sleep.

 

I need a fix, I need to feel

the softness and delicate rush of a beating energetic heart

pound away, chip at the stones and rotten ribs

and boom, just like that, I see colours and shapes that I

only witness when under the heady influence of my drug and fix.

 

I found my first real dealer, not in the back alleyways like many

of my friends or underneath a railway arch

close to the Bull Ring Market

before it become a place in which others spent money

on their designer drug.

 

I found my dealer in a shop on Bicester’s Sheep Street and the taste was heavenly.

I had a my first fix there and then, they did it for me

in that shop in full view of a passing policeman who smiled

and wrote down the name of another supplier in Oxford…

It was now legal. I was a wanton, abandoned, pumped up junkie.

 

I need a new fix, I am desperate now.

The sweat of the last hit has left me and I am dry

but not yet exhausted.

I spent pound after pound in that place but soon

I needed something bigger.

 

Oxford, London, back to Birmingham, New York, all in search of anything

to satisfy me. I only looked ill when I had not tried

a new batch for a while. The pressure of hearing voices in my head

as the withdrawal symptoms kicked in were the worst.

No money, no hit, resorted to trying second hand shit.

 

I got my hits from all and sundry, I would even find myself

sitting on a cold windy field outside of St. Malo,

my hair being gently teased by the approaching storm

as I sat cross-legged and joined in the fun with

some French girls, now that was a fix too far.

 

I have never let go of this ache.

I used it to get through my O Levels,

my degree, my childhood, my over-use teenage years

in which I felt forever in dire straits

to now, here and now, a brother in need of one more fix before sleep.

 

I thank every single musician for giving me such a wonderful vice

I thank all the record shops, the friends who taped their own collection

for me when desperate measures called and the street serenades

lifted my spirits for a brief moment  and for the buskers in the

subways who quelled my sweating brow.

 

Music is the curse, the saviour of my life.

Expensive as any habit can be, as bad as it wants,

as beautiful and heavenly as it should aspire to.

I need my fix, it’s my drug of choice

and it is my craving that drives my strengthened heart.

 

Ian D. Hall. 2014