Watched the lunar eclipse tonight--the moon transitioning into a wild chestnut sphere, a brown leather orb lobbed in the high west of a frigid late February night as if the one-eyed moon itself were taking a moment simply to close its eye meditating in winter prayer admist a frosty chandelier of stars. Went back home during my break at work to observe the hour long lunar wink on my back porch while downstairs frat boys drank cheap beer and played poker and smoked grass, unaware of the silhouette their solar address was casting on the nearest galactic cue ball.

One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, or ten, Money can't buy you back the love that you had then

Finish line....

So I made it through the
end of the week only imbibing
six beers!!!! Three 12 ounces
(an IPA, Pale bock and Pale ale
respectively)one seasonal sumptuous
Samuel Smith festive winter ale
and two 24 ounce PBR's can, which
the liquor store conveniently
began to ferry for only 1.49....
sixty cents cheaper than my
daily starbucks venti pickme up....

Off to cartwheel into an alcoholic
cycle of oblivion this weekend
In all confessional candor six beers
between sunday and Thurs is about
20 less per week than I've been
consuming. The goal is to only
get blitz on the weekend and to
be more focused on my literary
pursuits and not use alcohol
as a panacea to life's
solitary problem....I'll keep you
posted.....

the kingdom will not come by expectation....

There's something about the year 1844.
The Millerites believed
that 1844 would be the return of Christ circa
March 21st, 1844 ( nothin' beats a thief in the night)
The event was known throughout many sects of North
American Christianity as the "great disappointment"
The first telegram using Morse code would be sent
on May 24th of that year by Samuel Morse, the inaugural message being
that of "What hath God wrought" (numbers 23:23)....one day before
in Persia a messenger of the light revealed himself
as being a GATE to the metaphysical continuity
and spiritual evolution of mankind. The fact that
Morse's message was promulgated hours after the
heralding genesis of a new age
demarcating mankind’s spiritual odyssey
in the discourse of the net of time
serves as a modern day star of david
quietly looming over the
housing projects in a run-down
Bethlehem, a few shepherds familiar
with the noisome scent of sheep shit
pointing their question mark
shaped spears in astonishment at the
sight of a beaming orb
wondering just what all of this
could perhaps mean.

indeed, 1844, the German astronomer Bessel noted
that Sirius, the most ebullient star in the night
has a companion star next to it.

A month later Joseph Smith, founder
of the latter day saints, was lynched.

1844.


The date I notice
when my mid-day ambrosia
pick me up was christened
in a working class blue collar
stable in Milwaukee, breaking
my quest for five day
alcoholic celibacy.....

but hey, if you had to pick a year.....

Four fingers left to go...

There were times in the last three years
when fleeting mystical serenity was obtained
employing the use of alcohol as my metaphysical
snorkel, upholding the amber baton of enlightenment
in grapple similar to that of a patriarch and a scepter
after a day of writing, looking out the nocturnal sockets
of my bedroom window, taking intermittent chugs and swigs
before abandoning the contents of the bottle into my body and
doffing the cap off another bottle, another 40, another IPA
another shot, another Guinness. My vision skips across
the inky continents of the novel I am currently treading through
and then high dives off the second story of my
apartment window, lost in an upside down umbrella of snow
showcased by the yawning spotlight of a streetlamp--
if I look straight ahead as I tilt back the
hue of my bottle lost in the evaporation of planetary
bubbles sledding into the area of my face just above my
chin before I swallow and watch (almost in slow motion)
as the crystal rocket reverses its trajectory from
the brim of my lips, the nectar splashing into every
abandoned cell hollowed out inside my chest as I smile
and look back on to the December white of a fresh page.....


"I wouldn't try going cold turkey all at once." My brother-in-law, who is a
doctor advises me. "With the amount of alcohol you consume on a daily basis
you'll start shaking and sweating every night."


There were times when I lived with the psychic on
Heading avenue when I would go out into the woods at two
in the morning, the sylvan fountain of trees attired
in a thin sheath of snow, the skies bejeweled with
a broken chandelier of thermonuclear pebbles
as I searched for Sirius and smiled, howling as
I floated into the shadows of the night
a Fosters special Bitter or Icehouse
cupped in my palm. During the day, often
spring and autumn, around the pinkish tint
of a pending dusk I would lower myself into
what I already immortalized in my book
as the "nuclear woods." The same woods
my best friend David Hale got stuck in
on Patrick McReynolds 13th birthday sleep over
and we had to get help....the woods I dreamt
about exploring when I was in jr.
high with the crimped bangs and late-80's
side ponytail
and numerical high school
digits stitched into the jacket of my girlfriend close by
feeling somehow the awakening of our bodies
mirrored the awakening of the planet
the newness of spring
the endurance of summer
the ash of a fall evening
and the splash of ovum baptismal white
of a winter melting into the continuous narrative that is nature
years later finding myself somehow living on the upper lip
of the woods I loved in my early youth
loafing on a the thick bark of a toppled tree
a bridge to some childhood innocence
loafing, smoking my pipe, pouring back
into the hovel of my mouths the
the taste of a sunset childhood

and the taste of what is to come



For Christmas my creative writing professor from college
presents me with t he largest bottle of Jack Daniels I
have ever seen. If placed horizontally it resembles a
southern crystallized blimp showcased at a late-eighteen
hundreds world fair of arabesque intrigue.

There's something about the hardcore image of A
writer being an alcoholic. Jack London died when he
was 40. Kerouac was 47. when Raymond carver
was 39 years old the doctor said that
if he didn't quit drinking he would be dead
in six months. He ended up dying young anyway
(fifty, of cancer) but he said that he was more
proud of staying off the sauce than anything else
he had ever accomplished in his life.

The quality of his prose and the manner in which
he feisty inhaled every molecule of the last
decade of his life attest to the poetry of his
sobriety.


But writers are addicted to truth
when your truth is sloshing around
the corners of your lips
one second and then

trying to find something to fill the void
left by something that you
once put inside the interior shafts of your flesh.

When I was at the store today I told Tiffany who scans barcodes
and swipes link cards for low income families that
somehow can afford better clothing and vehicles
than i ever could that I am giving up booze for the
upcoming week (she saw that my order was fraught with frozen
vegetables, plastic silos of Gatorade and rice and inquired.)

Tiffany is hard core working class, skinny as a virgnina slim
who loves cheap domestic long-necks and country music and dogs.
I can tell that she has been having a typical Monday in America
can tell like all the rest of us that she is struggling
to make sense out of all the shit--struggling to make ends meet
struggling to find companionship (she refers to her boyfriend
as "dad" whenever he calls) struggling.

"Why are you giving up booze?" She says.

I tell her that I am only giving up booze for a week
and that the ultimate goal is to cessation of all
alcoholic products during the work week.

Tiffany continues to check out my item.
When she bends over placing the items into the
stationary cart at Sav-o-lot I can make
out the color of her bra.

"But you seem happy." She says. "If it makes you
happy all the time it can't be all that bad."

I turn around and begin to pack my groceries in
a box once used for tuna fish before shooting
a smile back at my checkout friend, whose
place of employment is much worse than that of my own.

Trying to go five days...

...Without orally ingesting the carbonated
copper liquid ambrosia of working
middle class americana
the elixir of youth harbinger of hopes
social lubricant of mankind, ingenious
marketer to the masses, liquid diploma
shaped entitlement gushing forth
icy froth of dreams vicariously
ferried into the snowy pasture
of mankind’s poetic longing
with each splash of the palette
QUASHING the existential shadow
of existence, the inevitable perils
of failure and loss
the ablution of possibility and being
a panacea for the integers found on pay-stubs
loan bills, credit card statements
a crutch to help the gnashed soul
continue through the world alone
a rod and a staff superseding
the image of God or the woman who
dumped your ass
a gauze for the broken-hearted
the amber pond of immortality
sluicing down the into the corporeal
enigine of the body
The feeling that you are here
forever and that you will never
die....

For this is why people get drunk or abuse various to substances
which may render lethal health imperatives come a decade time--
because more than anything else the substance is there for him
the substance is there to hold him,
is there to take him where he needs to go
is there to verify his virility and esteem
is there to make him laugh
is there to ameliorate his wit in public
is there to make him feel that he has accomplished something
is there make him feel that everything in his life has some sort of meaning

and the substance will do this in a way that no few Jesus's or
fuck friends
perhaps ever could because is does so with an intermingling
baptisim into the blood

while the substance is circulating
throughout the interstate arteries of his nervous system
there is no narrative too grand, no dream without reach

no story that cannot be spilled out into the gushing
current of language, much as my neighborhood
tap floods nectar out into pint glasses


After all, the raison d'etre of my alcoholism
is similar to why I come to writing
or why I come to fiction.
Why I want others to come to my miniature train cities
carved into the page in the shape of lower case shapes
being that I want to take the reader
somewhere they have never been before

and (maybe)
I want my story and my craft
to hold them when no one else on the
planet is there to do just that.


Over the last three years alcohol has been a part of my daily diet
Its the place i go to feel inspired, creative, alive
I wake up at weird hours and need a six pack to just
to crash for a few hours before heading off to work
anticipating the 24ounce cylinders I am to imbibe when I get
off eight hours later. Most weekends are a visual
cherry-oak haze of the interior of bars and ferrying
cube-shaped craft packs back to my apartment
from the liquer store, spending enough green
to send the Islamic owner on pilgrimage to Mecca....

five days..

over the last two years I've only ceased drinking
when I've been sick. Five days on my own volition.
Five days to try to bring forth that will
power, to sacrifice something significant
and to maybe, in the process
develop and grow into a human being
in a writer


something that has not even been imagine