Shelter from the Storm

The snap of the lighter and the hiss. The hash sizzles and I inhale, hold it til it burns my mouth and blow out a steady plume like an exhaust, creamy grey smoke curling out of the pipe.

Immediately I feel better. What is better than this. Maybe good coke after you’ve been anticipating it but even that’s more down to the expectation and delivery than the actual drug, whatever its contents may be these days.

But I feel better. Taste the piney resin. My bones settle lower into my skin. Sometimes you catapult too fast into hyperthinking. But when you get a sink-down instead of a lift off, that’s the one. With the tingle like a prolonged orgasm. It only works in the dark. 

Breathing like a ship hull contracting and expanding. Slow steps wading into a dry pool. A little desert wadi. Little doors open in my brain. I go in and out, everything making sense. 

Little lightning bolts strike thru the hairs on my legs, like they’re standing up and getting blasted. A long held back pain melts away, completely dissolves in seconds. 

Floating in the dry pool. The smoke-curl like a cyclone spout. Wish I had been stoned for Gonu. We taped the windows and drew the curtains and heard the rain and wind. I waited til no one looked and I quickly pulled past the curtain and looked thru the glass. No street lights. Wind blowing trees. Rain lashing. The sky a grey mud colour. And in the distance, the curling black silhouette, snaking up to the sky / down to the ground. Gonu slithering in the distance. Wonder if the mountain wizards survived.  

Spiritual feeling - so high it must be spiritual. Just a feeling, not verbal communication but mental spiritual communication. Silently communing with a god all empowering type feeling and some other wordless sentiment. Calm and silent, my brain totally slowed, off. Bliss. No torrents or onslaught of thought. 

Walking home, the desert nite air so thick it’s coming down on you, the still hot ground, fiery tarmac, coming up, squashing you in between. The streets are dead. The pale orange street lights beading the nite, black shadows beyond the beams. You float on down the uneven street balancing on paving slabs. There is no sound, the air is too solid. A car comes by from behind, you hear it only after it’s passed for its rumble built for so long behind in the background, perpetual. It passes violent and quick taking in its wake a large sharp black shadow, floating in silence. The shadow flys so quick past you you jump inside yourself, sure it was a giant flying blade slicing you in half, like your torso is gonna shoot forward where the blade flew thru you.

Some people need the stronger psychedelics but the hash is my gateway to whatever all this is. I can figure it all out when I pass thru it. 

They see shadows of the mountain wizard and wonder. 'Is he a shaman? Or just a shame, man.'