Addiction

It wiggles right behind the eyeballs
scratches and tickles the retina:
a tiny tangled net with light implications,
withdrawing and working
its way to the brain
traveling synaptic highways
jumping the gaps and sparking
like a bad battery terminal: grounded
but with a terrible and loose connection
caring not for axiom
nor the axon itself;
it’s entrenched in mode and method:
hibernating for a time like a groggy bear, and then waking
with omnipotent vibration, charging the gates, barring its teeth
and interceding on behalf of a potential
for action.
It tongues the eardrums,
whispers into nostrils, transmits datum and dopamine, alike:
becoming a vehicle for change in one’s mentality;
it massages behavior into habituation
and restructures a riddle after its own kind
like a distorted mirror vomiting a Mandelbrot Set onto
a Mobius Strip: an analogue for
relapse, reversion, return, and recalcitrance
while retreating into its own gaping wound
serving as tourniquet
for a tattered and torn limbic system
only to revisit the sickness like a dog.