Addiction

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

The poem equates beer and tobacco with poetry — both are things that keep you company in one place, alternatives to lockup. The brutal economy of the comparison refuses to rank vices: writing is another form of staying put, another way the confined self manages its confinement.

At six short lines, the poem works like a compressed syllogism. The line break after 'Poetry instead of' creates a moment where writing itself seems to teeter on the edge of imprisonment before 'lock-up' arrives as the alternative rather than the destination.