America’s Forgotten Epidemic: The Opioid Crisis

Endless Rapture of Cartoonish Delights

The rain falls upon me like the fists of an enraged gorilla
I walk along the sick city street with a tiny sack of vanilla
Though I must admit the stuff has lost its mild flavor
I take the last dose from a bag that’s borrowed on favor
The world bangs away into a misty cloud of insane vapor
I’m Superman trying hard to solve another inane caper

A bright-lit world of dank darkness begs me to save us all
With a single bound I leap over the ugly, brick-faced wall
I’m obliviously heading in the proverbial wrong direction
This place has all my enemies in one back alley location
The Jokers devised a cloning machine that actually works
I’ve chased thousands of him trying to fine-tune my forks

Two-Face and his goons have these huge spoons and green dust
They use them to sap my great powers and control my lust
The foes are amassing into a tremendous diabolical force
My superhero life is heading on a guttural, downward course
To feel the world again is no longer a touch I can truly relish
Their kryptonite grip is the hell of all that is really hellish

I try to remember if I ever fought their cajoling wicked ways
It’s hard to focus on the memories wasted away by giddy days
So, as I continue to fall from the lofty pedestal they call life
I now feel all the pain that I never felt in all that strife
As reality begins to show its nearly forgotten foreign face
My best unwanted friend is there to help me in this race

He looks a lot like Lex Luther but is best known as brownstone
I try to get him off my back and out of everything I’ve ever known
But we’ve become more than the moth and the cooking flame
We’re selective members in a callously high priceless game
It doesn’t take him long to get back under my sobered skin
I can feel the cool passion of his presence pulsating with sin

It’s a feeling I’ve never felt before, yet I will feel it evermore
We’ve danced our last bastardly dance upon that dopey floor
Only the other Kryptonians of this life know of what I’m saying
On to a druggie’s death I go, as I keep paying and paying and paying

Opiate Lullabies

Opiates can’t touch me
A needle full of skag has never skewered my sinful, fun-loving veins
Prescriptions of ungodly amounts of—Oxy, Tylenol 3, Percocet, Vicodin, Dilaudid, Demerol; for minor and major injuries—did not snare me like a witless carp on a diabolical treble hook, at least not yet
I’ve had my prescribed pill-popping fun and then some, but when the pills were gobbled and gone I was done

Opiates can’t touch me
Our first foster child was a curly haired girl with brown cagey eyes and a venomous knowledge base far beyond her tender age of four. Mom incarcerated for making candy…dad, unknown to most. Older brother’s ironic fist, and teenage sister’s best attempt at motherhood, reared the intelligent, savvy girl-adult until the house of shards collapsed during an early morning raid by the DEA.
Our second foster, a newborn fresh out of the NICU, trembles on my chest like a sack of Brown Sugar being cut at China girl’s mill.
They say his urges will lessen, but his tender, pink body will never forget its undying love for…

Opiates can’t touch me
It’s a dark steamy night, hot enough to run the ACs, but they remain quiet, unused.
Sweat glues me to the pliant leather couch like memories to the past. Facebook, another insidious drug of choice, flippantly informs me my Old High School Homie died of an overdose…he was forty-one and certainly not the first, last, or only one in my far-reaching circles.
Instantly a baseball from my youth whaps into my mitt and OHSH stands on the mound with his winner’s smile stretched wide; the fans—mostly friends and family, along with a scout or two—cheer him, cheer us, cheer life in a small town thirty miles Northwest of Mayberry. I could only believe, at the time, that OHSH’s star would shine bright and long and make my own cosmic flicker seem pale and short: like an old Soviet satellite passing below Venus on an inky night.

Opiates can’t touch me
Janine sits with me at lunch, and we’re dropping the anchor to weigh our new friendship.
Her history is as rich as my own and our lives have connections that seem beyond coincidental. Then, in blurring confessional I’m inside her tiny New York apartment about five years ago.
Her boyfriend, a big handsome dude, who’s supposedly dried out is heatedly defending his sobriety with slotted eyes and wet-sounding rancor.
Somehow, she escapes and lets him brood; only to return hours later to an unresponsive victim of his own undoing. Instantly I’m awash in her humanity—his immunity to life—and I think…

Opiates can’t touch me
On the news, I loved them like you did—immortalizing them as genius actor, the moonwalker that never left earth, a princess in a far away galaxy, and America’s best loved prince. And, like you, I grew up running down their dreams while riding shotgun in a ’74 Dodge Monaco 440 magnum on a trip from god. The king, the Joker, Tommy Boy, JJ, Luke the Drifter, and J. Depp’s bestie all dead from a crisis that’s put librarians, of all people, on the frontlines.
All these immortals were cut down like poppies in a Laotian field deep in the Thai highlands; most of them were in their prime, but every single one of them absolutely, positively believed that…

Opiates can’t touch me
In the ruins of a town that used to take pride in its high school heroes, the price of grain sold at the scales, and blue-ribbon heifers, pigs, or pies; she shivers from too little to wear. The house—once on the right side of the tracks—is beyond ramshackle, is beyond safe for occupation, is her last resort; icicles on eaves; frost on broken panes. The candle flame rises into the darkness of a dank basement, that’s missing a wall or two, like a lighter at the Smashing Pumpkins concert where she tasted it for the first time.

The baggie is small, one moderate trip to serenity or two small flyaways to stave off her next bout of the big sick. A sinister logo, demonic elephant, is the one Juju warned her about. “Tainted shit sis, fentanyl mix that killed Rodi, Dan, Peeper,” and the list goes on. She draws the serum into her magic wand and tightens the tournie.

It could be the high of all highs, the one that she’s been chasing since god knows when, the one that recaptures that first fantastic, supersonic out-of-this-miserable-fucking-world-high-as-fuck feeling.
The virginal dose; the return to nirvana each needle full promises but never delivers—or it could be the last drop in the endless drip to take those great big beautiful trips to a place without pain, a trippy oasis away from the cesspool of reality, the la-la land where nothing’s ugly, nothing hurts, and nothing’s nothing. She presses the dirty needle into the opaque flesh of her sinewy arm—long ago she stopped caring to hide the tracks of her otherworldly adventures because at some point it became time to live up to her FTW tattoos. And as the venom purifies her sobering blood in those greedy, corpulent veins she whispers, “Opiates can’t touch me.”

And you, you callously sit there idly guzzling your Sapphire-Tinis, your pathetic radlers, your overpriced mocha lattes while deep throating your Molotovs of Xanax, Adderall, and Ambien and blame him or her or they or theys on the tone of their skin, on their socioeconomic status, on being weak: a degenerate, a mongrel, an incurable disease of society that’s better off getting a hotshot than help—but you’re dead wrong Doctor who prescribed OxyContin like Flintstone’s chewables for decades, Lawyer who got filthy rich helping make Big Pharma even fucking bigger, Politician that declared war on the problem during the campaign but left the top seat in the department unfilled for years; and you Innocent Bystander who was comforted over and over again that opiates can’t touch me: until it did.

Until it left a festering wound along your aorta like a botched quadruple bypass—the unconscionable, inconceivable knowledge of seeing, touching, hearing, and smelling your loved one on the slab, blue and lifeless, colder than arctic ice, quieter than downtown Nagasaki after Little Man, pungent from decay and embalming fluid; until you were mugged at gun point in broad daylight in the richest neighborhood around; until you walked away from your first steady dealer empty-handed unable to comprehend your good standing credit is null and void and a blow job or unabashed fuck won’t sway the giver to give you one more bag, one more ounce, on favor because all along you acted the disingenuous prophet and foreknew that…

…Opiates can’t touch me

David Grubb is a retired U.S. Coast Guard Warrant Officer. He’s been a creative writer his entire life, yet never focused on it because of career and family. He’s changing that part of his life one day at a time and loving every minute. In retirement, he earned his BA in English (2017) and his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a focus on fiction (2019). He also immensely enjoys being a stay at home dad, more or less. His short stories have appeared in Toasted Cheese Lit Journal (2016), Touchstone (KSU literary mag—2016), 1:1000 (2016), Sixfold.org (2019), and The Bookends Review (forthcoming 2021). His first published poem appeared in The Elevation Review (Aug 2020). He is a volunteer staff reader for The Maine Review.

Website: https://www.agrubbylife.com/