Addiction

The speaker contrasts the company of beer and tobacco with poetry and travel inside the mind, then returns to death and an imagined train.

The speaker imagines poetry as company and movement outside confinement. The closing train and death prevent a simple claim that writing resolves addiction.

'Addiction' says 'That beer and tobaco / Keeps you company / in one place', offers 'Poetry instead of / lock-up' and 'Travel in your head', and ends 'As though / You were always / on that train'.

The poem sets habit, confinement and writing side by side as ways of staying in one place while the mind moves. 'Being the metaphor / Till there / Still is death' admits that poetry does not cancel the end it travels toward. The closing train joins motion and confinement in one image. Tobaco is kept as typed.