I’m always there, waiting patiently/ I’m the promise you always make, never seem to keep/ Falling into me is so freeing, yet the price so steep/ I crawl across skin, bead the brow/ Easy to regret, hard to fight in the now/ I’m the dragon your after, the one you’ll never find/ You lay awake and wonder if you’ll ever escape my bind/ What am I?
Think you have it? The answer is below.
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Answer: Addiction ('the dragon you're after' — chasing the dragon; sweat beading the brow; the promise to quit never kept)
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📖 The answer, explained
The trick here is that every line reads like it could belong to sleep, or love, or some other cozy abstraction, right up until the phrase "chasing the dragon" turns the whole poem sideways. Before that, "the promise you always make, never seem to keep" sounds like willpower in general — quitting anything. The sweat on the brow and skin-crawling sensation could be fever or nerves. It's the dragon line that locks the meaning into addiction specifically, since that phrase is slang for pursuing a high that never matches the first one. Once you catch it, the earlier lines snap into focus retroactively — the freeing fall with a steep price, the lying awake, the sense of being bound to something you can't outrun. The misdirection works by borrowing imagery from fever dreams and folklore before revealing it was withdrawal all along.
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