An Addict Reincarnated

 Stop me if you've heard this one: 

He wakes up with nothing internally out of place. Dis- 
comfort casts no shadow in his person and the world is 
tranquil and accommodating except that it is a forest 
and not a city nor a house. 

The sound of birds and rodents and larger beasts has 
replaced traffic and modern infrastructure one could 
associate with traffic, with the ingenuity of Man. 

When he turns his head the disquieting outline appears: 
the four legs, the elegant throat chest muzzle, the wild 
antlers. And self-recognition can no longer be suppressed.

The animal, the new him, despondently but willingly, lifts 
the rock-hard hoof and leg and begins toward the 
virgin forest, the soft, papertowel leaves canvasing the 
world of the dead. 

He tries to remember his name, as though that title should 
return something that fled in his sleep: But in the space 
where the name would righteously be printed there is 
the surprise of a knowledge of predators and plants and berries. 

He remembers heroin, down to the mildest variations of flavor, 
potency, the luck of certain deals. But the painful gravity of 
desire doesn't pull as it would in a human body. More like 
a postcard than a photograph, a sexy memento of somewhere 
he no longer need visit. 

The haunted serenity of the forest is his burden now. 
These antlers and teeth his only instruments. This extra 
disinterested in opiates, in sloth. 

From somewhere in the distance, the atmosphere is 
hammered apart in a flash. And in the zone of 
perception where these affairs are translated, the new 
him lifts and gallops toward natural safety. 

The shot rings again -- a warning or the mark of a 
novice he can't tell. He pounds those mighty hooves 
along the earth and the earth makes no reference 
to the destinies and time before this. 

It's all top-down organization after that. The soon- 
crowded trees not always so crowded. Little mice 
and chipmunks and things evacuate his crazy path and 
at least one disoriented owl remarks his frenzied self- 
preservation. 

Mean fire cuts through his brow while his tongue rubs the arch in 
his maxilla and the beastheart within him is finally, 
proudly certain: it was the old body that was the re- 
incarnation. 

***