the heroin tree

I was struck, a small hard seed

in the spoon’s quick alchemy,

where heat turned base metal to ritual.

My first environment was a chemical haze,

not born of water but slow, toxic runoff

promising deep, immediate peace.

My growth began by deliberate retraction,

a root system built on evasion and fear,

seeking the quiet of the subterranean world.

I grew downward, a tree inverted,

drawing strength from the blue-black stream

where the needle was the only faithful compass.

I drank the dark until the dark drank me.

Then came the morning the shadow was complete,

and I woke with nothing left to offer the void.

The surface of my skin, a tortured map,

spelled out every reason to surrender.

My hands shook with the sheer, cold panic

of a life that had finally run out of hiding places.

That was the day the compass broke.

Something in the core refused the final drop.

A single, nascent fiber, thin and electric,

dove past the abscessed soil,

past the foil, the residue, and the shame,

searching not for escape, but for purchase.

It found the cold, clean insistence of bone,

the demanding rhythm of the heart’s return.

Now, the trunk stands, rooted in labor,

in the prosaic grace of continuous effort.

My new anchors twist around the folded chair

in rooms smelling of charity and burnt faith,

corners where the air is thick with the testimony

of skeletons that learned to stand.

They grip the cold, cheap architecture of the tokens,

each one a thickening line, separating

the life that was sought from the life that was chosen.

Thirty days, six months, three years,

rings in the living wood,

marking seasons the sickness tried to take

and failed.

Above, the canopy reaches, reckless with sky,

no longer begging forgiveness for wanting light.

One limb learned to write, forcing the silence

that the lighter’s click used to fill.

Another reaches for people who can look

at my arms and still see hands capable of touch

without nails, without blood,

and a branch that extends quiet pardon

to the ghosts we failed to save,

the boy who taught me how to tie off

in a language he never lived long enough

to unlearn.

When the wind comes back,

carrying the old, sweet perfume of erasure,

the whole tree trembles, a deep, full shudder.

The roots lock harder.

The branches remember they are not veins.

I sway.

But I do not break.

This is the life I live inside:

the deep black pull of what almost buried me,

and the bright, impossible demand

of everything still ahead.

Both feed the same trunk, widening the rings.

The wound is simply the strongest point.

I am no longer ashamed of the places

the bark is scarred, or the tender green shoots

pushing out where the damage was worst.

Every curve of this tree is testimony:

what tried to kill me

taught the roots how deep

a thing must go

to hold a life that still chooses

to arc toward the sun.