Basketball diaries

Je vais bientôt avoir 15 ans et la dépendance "pepsi-cola" à l'héro, que j'ai contractée cet été resserre son étau autour de moi de plus en plus. Pour la première fois depuis que j'ai perdu la virginité de mes veines, à 13 ans, j'ai le sentiment qu'il faut que je me remette d'aplomb vite fait, parce que le bahut, ça s'approche à une vitesse vertigineuse et pas moyen d'aller à l'école quand on est accro. La dépendance "pepsi-cola" à la poudre, c'est une première accoutumance bénigne qui s'installe subrepticement pendant qu'on se dit: "Merde, ça fait déjà trois ans que je fais le con avec la came, mais je sais à quel moment je dois m’arrêter, et je ne suis jamais accro." Mais un jour au réveil, le nez se met brusquement à couler, les yeux à pleurer, les muscles du dos et des jambes sont lourds et raides. On est le dindon de la farce , finalement, même si on croit être "maître du jeu" depuis longtemps. Alors je me regarde dans le miroir, et je m'aperçois que je ferais mieux de laisser tomber la poudre aussi sec. Je cesse de me raconter des histoires, quoi.

Les gestes symboliques, ça donne bonne conscience mais ça n'est nourrissant pour personne.

Je veux juste être pure.

The time we were supposed to go that out of sight Boys' Club camp, age nine, if we could get through that month that summer before then end...because this is no bullshit, where I am coming from...this is the way I measured my future time...there was no way you could think of one without the other...every time a big trip was coming up, or the season was starting in some sport... anything that was worth looking ahead to, well, that's when it always seemed the sirens were gonna start the death chant.
But it's not at all just something that's past and solved. Not at all. It's just that I can see it a little clearer now, that fear is their tool...and it works very well...and they use it very well. And I am still using it to measure my time, only I don't give a screw about trips to camp anymore, or basketball games two weeks from now. It's just gotten bigger now...will I have time to finish the poems breaking loose in my head ? Time to find out if I'm the writer I know I can be ? How about these diaries ? Or will Vietnam beat me to the button ? Because it's poetry now... and the button is still there, waiting...

Little kids shoot marbles
where the branches break the suN

into graceful shafts of light…
I just want to be pure.

I left dazed out in the streets like I had just come out of a four hour movie. I didn’t understand. I thought about that face all night, and death. I almost flipped and I took two reds even to knock me out but they don’t feel like they’re working.

After it was safe to go out again, everybody filed past Teddy’s closed casket and if you wanted to you said a prayer. If you didn’t want to I guess you just stood and felt shitty about everything.

So anyway as usual the transit cop comes along at 181st St. and kicks the guy off and the guy gives me this pathetic sad wave good-bye as the train was pulling out like he was thinking, “Who’s gonna listen to me now ?” and I felt blank and sad like always after that happens.