Addiction

A stripped-down addiction poem that treats habit, poetry, confinement, and travel as different forms of the same survival mechanism.

'Addiction' lays out a flat survival arithmetic: 'beer and tobaco' keep you company 'in one place', and 'Poetry instead of / lock-up' offers 'Travel in your head' as the only available motion. The poem treats substances, writing, and confinement as interchangeable ways to stay put, then collapses them into a final image of perpetual transit toward death - 'As though / You were always / on that train'.

The poem turns on the phrase 'in one place', which it keeps quietly contradicting: company arrives only when you are pinned, and the lone escape is interior, the metaphor that lets you 'Travel in your head'. The misspelled 'tobaco' is left exactly as the speaker writes it and reads like offhand, unbothered speech. The hinge 'Being the metaphor / Till there / Still is death' is the cold turn - poetry is offered as the substitution for lock-up, but it buys no exemption from the destination, only a more bearable confinement. The closing train is not a journey at all but a held position: motion and stasis fused, so that addiction and the writing meant to replace it become the same act of being carried somewhere you never chose.