Smoking K2 on a Dark Road Somewhere Outside Savannah While Zeke Freaks Out About the Cop Car That Just Drove By – Cash Compson
September 15, 2022
for Rico & for the monsters who made K2 bang back in 2012.
Zeke is speaking
with lips that
don’t open. Fried,
aghast.
I don’t like it out here, dude, it’s just us, we’re just out, standing.
This is not being high. This is lost.
Zeke got popped for
smoking real weed in
Georgia before and that’s
why he’s freaking out, why
we’re smoking this mind-scramble
shit that feels like huffing molten scrap
metal in the first place instead of
some actual weed. Feels like
an old, ancestral illness in the blood when
you hit it. Stirring.
Nothing worth romanticizing. Everything tastes like shit.
They drove by, looking out
“a while ago” I say and
my voice doesn’t belong hanging with the wetness in the air, syrup dripping from big trees.
yes and they’re back & I can’t get arrested again
We’re fast, bright.
What if it’s permanent?
“Being arrested?”
This shit we smoked
o fuck the lights swooped, crawl to the water
That black road by black water,
I’m sitting up against
the car and this shit tastes awful. Smoking
it makes my bipolar come
to life even when we’re
dead for a bit. Cannot believe
I paid money for this. Heart feels like
someone else’s. I’ll never again’
rest fully. I am a creation. Far from birth.
The sum of my intake. I don’t know why I do it.
Zeke’s in that dream that
comes with summer sundown.
dude they slowed down they
fucking basically stopped they’re just gonna—
(but earlier i saw this girl drinking
ice water & taking
pictures of herself
from all the angles
in Chippewa Square)
—gonna come back, let’s roll
fuck, I know he saw me
(the muscular oak
trees there grew
a great handshake
over her and
she posed with
big trees &
did not care
who watched her do this)
Breathe in, my melted ribcage:
I have not breathed
in so long—
I hate when
you smoke;
you just stand
and don’t say shit. I can’t
feel my fingers and I feel
my nails, my teeth and we’re going to prison.
Legal isn’t legal here. I drove into mud.
hot sweat from him
and I smell it
instead of the
heavy fecund groping
labyrinthian garden
under our bones. Zeke
ends somewhere, then I start.
I
think this might be it,
we’re dying. At last.
“This girl today,” but nothing else aloud. Speaking rattles the embalming.
The kind
we dream of
smoke shouldn’t ever
be so white
(& i looked
at her with
all her freckles)
let’s just finish it at home,
now, okay, now, living christ, shit
amidst that buzz-saw tinnitus,
that feeling that
something is finally here
with us,
taste so rancid
in me; I
am so dirty.
The smoke: you never know
when it starts
or when it
leaves you
like belief in anything; the present tense evaporates—
(so, so many freckles
upon her, her
in a hot big sweater
in the damp
murder of afternoon)
we’re probably both dead
dead, irreparably, and this is some velvet cloud glory hole—
I’m just
going to go dammit fuck
you
(blue jeans were
ripped, the lightest
red hairs raised
on moonrock white)
—Zeke unravels with
impunity on the
K2, always. Bluedark turns to burnt air. Foreign
now.
Once before I smoked it & came to know this is your life, you were once a child & that is gone & you were a young thing & now you are less, shrinking every day, held among the rain & the things that grow low down close to the floor, you’re in it, something you can never be stands just outside your heart, waiting—
no mother anymore to save you, nothing but old prayers withering, suspended, no ears to catch them all, just you & a handful of days between utter black dark sleeptown & that rip in the fabric, onyx night unto me…
paid eleven dollars for that. Unholy.
(she looked like a
thousand girls i’ve seen;
comforting like home like honey & thunder)
& that was what that was.
No hunger for days. My ribcage, Christlike.
Where’s that profound shit this time? We gotta roll
He’s melting down. They didn’t even
see us. We
are with the
bludgeon of night in
the illustrious moonglow rubbing
ever-untouched wooded cradle and
it always smells
like rain out by
the river and
Can you see? Can you see on this shit right now?
(the best part
of seeing & not speaking
is filling the skin of
another world with
whatever you’ve wanted
since you could breathe. The only things
i don’t ruin
are the ones
i don’t touch)
I don’t know how I got
down here, this moment
where I am on
one side of
my life and
everything I’ve touched
is elsewhere and
I can make my eye twitch/I’m going to fucking die—
He’s coming back, Jesus—
I can do absolutely anything—
yes, a chariot glides over purplish mirage, nectar seeping at the corners, godly painting with rain.
O this is a time
where I’m praying to die
and he’s serious.
Aglow. Alive. Renaissance bright
those headlights,
(i knew even
in that first
moment of togetherness
that she & i
never speak &
we are not
the same species
maybe she
smiled at
me when i
wasn’t looking because
that’s how lucidity
works, i hear)
red, blue ignite:
together we make
something very patriotic
I’m so happy to be adorned by such an unsullied white mess of light.
he is crying
my friend
is choking
his eyes are red
his eyes are vacant
he is sad
I wish I
was still high.
(when she left
down the street
i took her place under
the great earthen
round of applause. trees were
just trees then, so
i bought these
drugs to grow
movies after dark.)
do you think
I’m somewhere in
her selfies: eyes
closed, trying to
look somewhere else?
scatter me steal me god fuck: after K2
show me
Renaissance-white
bodies of
strawberry and sunset-headed girls
my hands do not reach
show them
melting against the grain
of other mouths, birth me a
city to sleep under
show me what
it is exactly
that you wanted me to do
with all this walking-around time
show me what
you know
because I need to know
what I smoked and
sleepwalked away
I need to know
this absence
of pleasure
was for something
I need to know
if anything was worth anything
if my body was just for rusting
if I thought I was a god
when I was just meat
decaying gracelessly
with every season.