Song: Opiophobia Poem by Dave SmithWhite

So now I am this older guy;
I am no longer young.
Was once a bolder alumni,
Whose friends were highly strung.
Yet we all survived the Sixties,
While some bespoke in tongues;
We smoked the weed like hippies,
And did damage to our lungs.

And as we aged, we became enraged,
At the increasing feckless youth.
We warned and scorned them, at every stage:
That life was 'claw and tooth'!
As pride itself has no bounds,
We were sure we were the proof:
That our peerless souls had real control,
And that sounds like the truth.

Big Pharma saw an opportunity;
We fell beneath their spell.
That if normal life was anxiety,
They had just the pill to sell.
Along with compliant doctors,
They'd make us feel so well;
These artful spiel concoctors,
Were the marketers from hell.

So I'll thread the hottest needle,
Through the leather of my veins.
With the sweetest scent of Fentanyl,
I'll cast off my ball and chains.
And they'll keep saying I'm evil,
'Cause I wanna kill my pain,
For the Oxycodon was legal then,
But too pricey to obtain.

So on the street, cheap heroin,
Was easy to procure.
There was no romance,
In this desperate dance;
This waltz into the sewer.
Puffed-up with bloated arrogance,
And altogether much too smug;
With a self-inflicted harrowing,
We sought out the analogue drug.

And so becomes a crisis,
That all in power avoid.
Like a drum roll for cruel Isis,
It's the terror: opioid.
They declared that these were 'old school' vices,
Of them junkies of the past;
And if left to our own cool devices,
We'd just, die out, at last.

So I ride my luck a little, for a diminishing return.
Like duck stuck on a griddle, to escape is what I yearn.
Is this a simple riddle, on which the landscape turns;
Or will Donnie meekly fiddle, as middle America burns?

With his tiny hands a twiddle, there's nothing that he learns.
Too focused on his diddle, he quibbles facts and spurns
All those he must belittle, like we've got no concerns,
But to interrupt his lazy idyll, while middle America burns!