The Stimulant

My hands tremble, dropping everything
in their fumbling grip as my body succumbs
to the tremors the metallic silver, blue and red can
failed to mention its contents would provide -
an unnecessary and unexpected fear descends as
my eyes dart this way and that, paranoia gently placing
its firm grip around the steadily increasing
beat of my heart while the customers shop unawares;
the pain of my left wrist extends to the knuckles
of my hand now as the transactions double
with the lengthening of the ceaseless stream of locals
who will simply never have enough of fulfilling their
own needs, especially the convenience store gambler,
a wretched hag out to torment me with her insistence
on awkwardly purchasing her weight in scratch cards.
A brief reprieve is sought in the bathroom, but it is
when I am locked away from the outside world that
the antipodes of my mind reveal themselves to be
the dark expanses I always feared they were, the glassiness
of my eyes reflecting my face back at me in the mirror -
and I am at a loss to explain how such a huge
haggard face came to be confined within the black
recesses of pupils so seemingly innocent (once upon a time).
The twitches begin soon after the bathroom horror
truth, and only a miniscule revelation brought on
from some irrelevant train of thought saves me
from collapsing in pure fright before my colleagues:
Time only passes in working shifts, in the things
we do, both recreational and enforced - it is only
in periods of utter stagnation, of literal nothingness,
that it begins to pass in seconds, minutes, hours,
days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia;
and each iota of such blatant inaction could only be
deemed as ultimately being one thing when that life expires…
Wasted.

(a can of Red Bull made me feel quite uneasy in work the other day)