A Junkie in Walmart, the first poem i've written in years

A Junkie in Walmart

There is no heroin chic
Off the four lane
Between the fields of goldenrod
Most likely no heroin at all
Oxy or Viks, maybe Fentanyl

Under the fluorescents
A graceless dancer walks the isles
A light boneless shamble
Then a slight twitch
An unscratched itch

A frizzy listless blonde
Ageless
Youth burnt away
Face unmarred by wisdom
Or memory

Sprawled in awkward ease
Across an almost empty cart at checkout
Dirty jeans and faded shirt separated
Exposing pallid flesh
Indifferent equally to propriety and provocation

based loosely on the woman ahead on me in line last night... sorry if it sucks balls.

I like it. Quite a lot, in fact.

Ditto. You captured something very real very well. For some reason, the fields of goldenrod are what get me.

thanks folks... actually there is only golden rod on one side in real life, the plaza is on a corner and the other side is next to the potters field for the state hospital... but there is no way to work an insane asylum's cemetery into a poem without going over the top campy. actually the walmart, the bob evans, the lowes, burger king, ect are all built on the old farm colony fields where the patients grew there own food up into the 50s... there is a fine z grade horror movie in there somewhere.

Poetry, in my view, should have no rules. Write what you see, not what's on view and forget all the rules of poetry, just write it in the same way a painter paints. I like it.