Nicholas Alti’s Comments

Everything I’m writing about at the moment comes from the influences of chronic pain, drug addiction, drug use, depression, and how these all individually and combined sort of disrupt and render meaningless, like, all this fundamentally “human” shit.

So, what is “thinking” when the mind is always disrupted by a painful nerve disorder, when the first thought is and will always be “ouch” and everything else is filtered through that? How does addiction compound that? How does depression compound that compound? What about “desire”? How do you purely desire something when your first desire is always “I wish I wasn’t hurting,” and then your second “I wish I wasn’t hurting and depressed”? What about “need” or “hope”? What about “love,” what about “optimism,” what about “what about”?

I don’t know. These poems are attempts to explore that unknowing.

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