J.B. Stone
ADVENTURE TIME & ADDERALL
after Pendleton Ward
Any given day
a couch in the
student lounge
would resemble
a bed. & a bed
would resemble
a coffin.
A menagerie
of tasks
would morph
into a swarm of maggots,
crawling, worming into my
being. Eating away at my senior
year. Failing class after class. No
one even knew I wrote more words
to my potential suicide note than to the
3000-word essay on Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus which I never turned in. No one
even knew, while my attention was lifted by the
daily dosage of Concerta—my spirits weren’t. No
one even knows that the vein in my wrists still twists
like an over-juiced lemon, that my bones feel like a bowl
of aspic left inside the back of someone else’s fridge for far
too long. No one even knows that the day I started weening off
my medication—it was forced. No one even knows the necessary
escapism cartoons can conjure, the lunch break we all crave when the
world is burning; when our anxieties turn our bodies into reluctant waste
lands; to watch a world shaped by lavender horizons & gumdrop moons. An
atlas of candy-coated villages, frost-smothered kingdoms, volcanic sentients, owl
spirits, grass ogres, treetop rogues, and bacon pancakes, is a medication all its own.
When the world is a rooftop about to collapse, under the weight of an ocean no gutter
could funnel out. Before the flood, I’d like to know that when I let myself drift——I can
enjoy the ride while it’s there—and be ready to answer to my reality——when it decides to
wash me over