Compartmentalization                                                            

 
Of course the door was closed to the room
in which he was snorting crank through

a tightly-rolled twenty-dollar bill, whose eye,
though much wider than a needle’s

would admit only a thin stream, so necessitating
the semi-privacy with like-minded semi-strangers

far and separate from the old-friend crowd
inured to the usual intoxicants distant

from the snowy amphetamine rising to the olfactory
nerve, with which none of said crowd

had experience—or desire to gain
—the new high, another door and hinge beyond the first—

yet stronger than that slab of seasoned oak,
miles thicker too