That the magic wears off over time seems obvious
Now I'm over the age of thirty-five.
I fail to feel anything from taking this drug.

My life stopped twenty years ago. Back then, I was capable of love
And saying "Yes. OK." to things like going out.
Life was not a nightmare
And sleep was no dreamless death parody.

Old drug users are the stalwarts
In the cold. They still say that they are happy and free
Even now, when the party for humans is over.

The magic wore off, when the magical world I had seen,
Of a breathing, independent natural universe, bigger than any of us,
That cared infinitely about our souls and our spirits
Gave way gradually to me, locked in some old room,
Pointing a finger at my own hand for sixteen hours.
Bored. Alone. With a headache.

Non-addictive psychoactive drugs are for revolutionaries
Who were made redundant when their class disappeared
In the 1980s.
Now we sit around, bearded and bored-looking,
Like those holograms
They put in crap suburban museums and surround with the smell of sulphur.

No psychoactive substance has ever
Permanently transformed the lives of every citizen
And the revolutionary mind, much like the state,
Can petrify and become mechanistic.
I was a detached and secretive bureaucratic state for a long time.
A Hermit Kingdom searching for a hit.
Pogrom another major organ.

The great lamb of my supposed potential
Became a shit sheep in my early 30s. I looked for a herd to hide in.
Addiction hides a past made out of shame and guilt.
The units of control.
It also makes you useful.
It turns your body into a processing plant,
Generating added value to junk.

This is the state we're in.
The dead flinch but they aren't alive.

Commodities are addictive drugs.
Our society, by putting God in the stockmarket,
Has made addicts of us all.
We have no dignity or self-worth.
All that matters is the transaction.
Bodies process the junk.
More junk is made.
Drug imbibed or plastic toy, makes no difference.

Addiction is genetic nowadays.
It can't be controlled or overcome by changes of circumstance.
Human nature is too powerful for junk.
Give in to it. Like the consumption of crap,
It is an ineluctable drive,
That has dominated humanity for all time.
This selfish urge is our original sin.
We are not selling you anything.
We shit plastic into landfills.
We work to consume to work to consume.
While those who don't are exiled.
The cliff edge we are all speeding towards
Is an illusion.
None of this is real.
It is all a dream.
Just keep processing the junk.
Work hard. Process the junk.
Become CEO of our own body - junk processing facility.
Be the best. It needs its fix, a new phone,
Or oxycodone, debt
To accumulate profit.
To circulate capital
To do what is now entirely natural.

Maybe the magic never wore off but I'd forgotten about it.
Then it was stolen for profit like led off an old church's roof.
Maybe the magic has balanced up with forces designed to mitigate
Any devastating impact that a further nuclear detonation
In my brain would have on future survival prospects.
My body, nowadays, crumbles in anticipatory horror
At the thought of an ecstasy / amphetamine hangover.
During my prime, I was aware of emotionally jagged terrain,
But I did not face an immediate prospect of work.
Picking up a phone to listen to The Wanker speak
About how he gets lots of sex because he is a regional manager.
And "the team" are, monthly, forced to exhume and present
Their corpse-facades. When he visits,
Frozen in time, from when they, the staff, could feel happiness.

Natural selection
Made nice work of the happy people.
They were stampeded by elephants
And eaten by bears and lions.
They trusted psychopaths
Not to betray and kill them in their sleep
And were killed in their sleep.
The people that healed the sick
Were burned at the stake
By the people that they cured, for playing God.

The clever ones, with the art and the philosophy
Were slaughtered by the meat heads.
They've been replaced by the slime balls.
They grin as they do it:
"I am with you. Whatever."

The optimists were the ones who stayed in Germany
And got sent to gas chambers to stop their broken hearts from ticking.
There is less and less happiness to be had anywhere, ever.
If we should find ourselves happy,
We should take that as a sign
That something
Has gone, or is about to go
Terribly,
Terribly,
Wrong.

In spite of all this grimness,
The magic never goes away completely.
The fact that I am here, experiencing things, tells me that the world is still weird.
And attempts to convince people otherwise often fail.
Magic has been taken away and processed,
And I've been pumped full of stupid ideas
About "human nature" by people who know as much as anybody else about nature
But have more money to spend
On fucking me up.

They all want me to climb into a gilded box
And enjoy my life inside my "new home".
Lined up in the sanatoriums of the sane.
With metal pokers, they emboss upon souls
A mark of nature - that this is all
We can hope for.

Those who know what is natural
Condemn those who do not coalesce
Around the bonfires of this newly found certainty,
Staying warm, watching circadian repeats
On the TV screens of souls turning on the spits,
A new tradition upholds.

Each person convinces each other that the norm
Is the stupefied roar! "To be born and to exist
Without explanation or reason, and not to conform
To acts that seem patently absurd is criminal!"
Life is not magical. All recalcitrant members
Who continue to wonder, are criminalised, humiliated
Beaten, stigmatised and forced to inhabit ghettoes.

By the age of thirty,
Most minds have succumbed to dull habits
And merely creak on as bodies do.
They tremble, lean forward to keep one's dispossessed
Genes alive in their dull children.
Their mental lives devoted to their obituary.