@Intangible Girl, come to think of it, something very similar happened with some of my earlier poetry (all gone up in flames a few years ago, a la Jim Morrison). I'd sat down with my 10-book series of "Getty Through the Decades" or something like that; basically a series of books with iconic Getty photos of the decade, a decade per book. Using some of the imagery and an over-active imagination, I wrote a 17-page epic about a man on a drug trip. Vivid imagery (I mean, I had these weird and wonderful photos as inspiration, after all), each part of the trip corresponding properly to the type of drug he was meant to be on at the time. At the time, I hadn't done any drugs myself (that came - and ended - a few years after), so I had some guys I knew back then read it through. They'd taken just about every hallucinogenic and most narcotics by then, so they were able to tell me when I was straying too far from the realm of possibility in terms of matching the drug to the trip and vice versa. Got the all-clear and posted the poem as a note on Facebook. My old youth pastor hits me up almost immediately asking me what went wrong, why did I start doing so many drugs, blah blah blah. A few days later, get sat down by my folks to go through the same interrogation all over again. Ironically, that experience may actually have been one of the reasons I eventually did end up doing every drug I'd written about, in the space of about 12-18 months. Eventually sobered up and found that I'd decided to burn all my poetry notebooks in a huge bonfire while fighting about my then-girlfriend about it. Mmm... might be time to dig out that collection of Getty books and do it again...
