Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

What was the point of it? The stoned 

life, the chased, snorted, shot life. Some low 

comedy with a cast of strangers. Time 

squashed flat. The 1001 names of heroin 

chewed like language. Nothing now to know 

or remember but the dirty taste 

of it, and the names: snuff, Death, a little taste, 

H—pronounce it etch—, sugar, brownstone, 

scag, the SHIT, ghoda gaadi, #4 china, You-Know, 

garad, god, the gear, junk, monkey blow, 

the law, the habit, material, cheez, heroin.  

The point? It was the wasted time, 

which comes back lovely sometimes, 

a ghost sense say, say that hard ache taste 

back in your throat, the warm heroin 

drip, the hit, the rush, the whack, the stone.  

You want it now, the way it lays you low, 

flattens everything you know 

to a thin white line. I’m saying, I know 

the pull of it: the skull rings time 

so beautiful, so low 

you barely hear it. Itch this blind toad taste. 

When you said, “I mean it, we live like stones,” 

you broke something in me only heroin  

could fix. The thick sweet amaze of heroin, 

helpless its love, its know- 

ledge of the infinite. Why push the stone 

back up the hill? Why not leave it with the time- 

keep, asleep at the bar? Try a little taste 

of something sweet that a sweet child will adore, low 

in the hips where the aches all go. Allow 

me in this one time and I’ll give you heroin, 

just a taste 

to replace the useless stuff you know. 

Some say it comes back, the time, 

to punish you with the time you killed, leave you stone 

sober, unknowing, the happiness chemical blown  

from your system, unable to taste the word heroin 

without wanting its stone one last time.