Pandora's Bottle by POM Winner Robert Kelleher

Photo by EV via Unsplash.

I swerved my ride into the mountainside.
I was drunk as bliss that day.
I served a concrete week inside
where dopamine fiends stray.

And consumer poison is the American way.
Prohibitions always divide us.
Pharmaceuticals sway congress today.
Brain chemicals still drive us.

Judges and politicians claim premonitions
and ransom families for guilty admissions.
They author laws that create outlaws
and equate human flaws to evil cause.

End the inhuman War on Drugs
whose agents swagger like righteous thugs.
Kill the moral talk you’re trying,
you’re lying as my sick friends are dying.

Junkies and “functionals” live to score
poppies that power the Afghan war
or siphon north black tar and snow
stained pink by the blood of Mexico.

Pill doctor shoppers haunt the Midwest.
Bathtub chemists zombify the blessed.
Old boys crack Pandora’s bottle every night.
Cement gypsies turn the color of fluorescent light.

Welcome to the dawn of the American police state
where fear and apathy shape constitutional fate.
Two million citizens sleep in a cage tonight
too few are violent, too few are white.

Education and rehabilitation can heal fatal spirals.
Empathy uplifts but vengeance defiles.
Smash spy tech and spin a cleaner Earth.
Burn the doctrine that wealth equals human worth.

In my last life,
I walked through chemical fire and hypothermic rain
and poured beautiful dreams down my drain.

Now, I ask the grim keeper of fear:
“is the age of psychic slavery here?”
She smiles and tells the truth unfurled:
“one knows almost zero about the world.”