Dreams & Drugs: It's Complicated

By Karen Mutsatsa

This is a collection of poems written during my teens and early twenties, when addiction was at its most intimate. The poems move between sobriety, relapse, and the uneasy thresholds in between; where hope and fear coexist.

The writing is unapologetically inward. Many of the poems orbit the self: its pain, its grandeur, its urgency to be witnessed. Read now, they can resemble narcissistic records of suffering, yet they also reveal an early self-awareness, like a recognition of that self-absorption, and an inability to stop documenting it anyway. Whether this intensity belongs to youth, addiction, or both is left unresolved.

An unintentional religious undertone runs throughout, particularly Christian language of guilt, judgement, and self-surveillance. I was not religious at the time and am even less so now. Rereading these poems suggests those motifs were inherited rather than chosen, shaped by a childhood where individual pain was discouraged unless it served the collective.

Taken together, these poems are less a performance than a record. They document a mind trying to survive itself, oscillating between insight and denial, arrogance and collapse: before balance, distance, or forgiveness were possible.

Contents

Dreams

15 A Dreamer at School

16 Try-Hard

17 Blossoming

18 The Gambler

19 Gone Finishing

20 Rooting

21 Move Mountains

22 "Believe it or Not, It's Just Me" The Greatest American Heron Theme song

23 On Behalf of Misfits Everywhere

25 What I Know

26 Be Beautiful

27 The Maddest Vigilante

28 Freedom Writer

30 People Like Me #3

31 Pick Your play

33 Ndezvenyu (That's your problem, that's a you problem)

35 Why Role Models are important

36 Grit #1

37 Courage: Know it, & know it well

38 A Soldier's Tale

39 Grit #2

40 Baton

41 I Will Change the World

42 Don't Suffer Fools

43 Not Afraid

45 The Ascension: You cannot take everybody with you

46 Becoming: A prayer

47 Kids Like Me

48 Do You Realise That You're a Champion?

49 Little Fish

50 How Did You Do It?

51 Friendly Reminder

52 First, You Must Crawl

53 Good morning, Sunshine

54 The Functioning Depressive in Capitalism

56 What Took You So Long?

Drugs

60 THE HOOK TO MY PETER

61 DEATH NOTE

62 METAMORPHOSIS

63 SCARS & TATTOOS

64 THE ADDICT

65 (DON'T) DO DRUGS, KIDS

66 DONE BEING SOBER

67 SAD KID SOCIETY

68 WHERE DO SAD GUYS GO?

69 THEY SAY IT'S A DISEASE

71 SELF CRITICAL

72 SADKID SPEAKS

73 SELF HATE

74 "I CAN QUIT WHEN I LIKE..."

75 DAVE'S STORY

76 RELAPSE

77 LETHARGY

78 DREAMS & DRUGS: IT'S COMPLICATED

79 PEOPLE LIKE ME #1

80 CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF

81 NOTE TO SELF

82 DETOX

83 DAMNED AND SAVED

84 TOXIC HEDONISM

85 SEND ME FLOWERS

86 PEOPLE LIKE ME #2

87 HI, MY NAME IS KAREN, & I'M AN ADDICT

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8875P4Z
• ISBN13: 9798185500682
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"