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