Poem of the Alcholic

Poem of the Alcoholic
((Where’s the River)(Confessional Poetry))

When you’re a drunk, you drink as if you are an endless river,
I know, I have, and one’s emotions flow like currents high tides,
never stopping, never knowing how to stop, never stopping because
it is to you not worth the trouble or time, and you say: I can stop
anytime, anyhow, and it is better than anything else anyone has offered,
why would, why should I stop? they offer nothing but talk, talk, and bills,
and a troubled world. Thus, quiet in a corner I’d sit, dreaming, dreaming,
smoking, and never quiet knowing, never joking, laughing: just drinking
and smoking hours and hours away, my face like glass, my mind drifting,
my feet and butt, getting up and going to the bathroom, coming back, staring
at pictures behind the bar, and making gestures, listening to the music box,
staggering about, here and there, you hit your head against the wall, and ask:

“…how did I get here?”

And you wonder why you do what you do, but you do it over and over and

you’ll do it tomorrow again, and you’ll do it again, and again— and over and over,

day after day after day, and your body finally says: enough, enough,

you’re going to die at forty… if you don’t stop.

Now being sober for twenty-four years, I ask myself:
who else would do such things? Live a drunken life, trying
to smother and suffocate one’s will, and at some breaking point—
you hide like a mole, a ragbag , of a man, this is what you’ve become.

It all comes slowly, at nineteen, you say: not me, I’m too young,
too physical, but it catches up to you, and blocks your will, deadens
your spirit, covers your soul, makes you the fool…; nineteen has long
passed now, you’re not sure what a man is, you’re thinking with the mind
you had at nineteen, and you are thirty-six! What happened? It is like boiling
a frog alive, slowly, and it not knowing it.

You always know where the river is though, it’s that drink, that object,
the main thing of your life, your love, your god: you hid it in the car trunk,
at home in the back of the toilet; the extra money you hid from your wife and

kids, hidden well in your sock, so you can go back to the river,

finish your ongoing daily pilgrimage, soon, very soon it will consume you,

and you’ll sell your cloths, and rings and cars, and sporting things,

you’ll even borrow and beg, go to the food shelves , to save money for

beer and booze. It’s never ending; it has your will, and its own.

The demons are bare and sinister and put corkscrews on your valves,
so you crave and crave and crave, stiffen with panic, you find a way
to escape the house, and go to the river (you even create fights with
your wife, so you get kicked out) for your beer and booze, hence, bury
your mind back into the muddy reappearance of your one and only
true love… unimaginable, but so very true.

You lose your free will; your mind slips into the madhouse, as
if it was exploring, looking for its identity, but you find you are
simple an object, a drain to pour down the remains of the river…

You are an object acting upon others; you smile and frown—as the
moment demands, and try to make it through the day, counting the
hours away, until it is time to drink again. You feel like the clown, and
you want to become drowned in your obsessive river of beer and booze, a
death and rebirth, a night to morning curse, engagement…sobering
only means getting ready again for the fathomless tides in your mind
the shut off valves that make you crave for your drink, swim in your
pitiful river, unloading those contemptible thoughts, yellow-eyed
monsters, caught in a storm, never to diminish soon, for you have entered
no-man’s-land, a no-man’s zone: dreamscapes, obscure revelations…
colorful cuckoo birds, hiding in another’s nest—that becomes
your life! Your quest, you plight; this is really you in a nutshell,
this is you, at your best, your worse, is yet to come.

Your sleep is twisted, you really never get it, and you pass out. Your
breath horrid, dry, stale, and you reek in your sleep, and moon, and snore
and fart—as if your guts were to explode, and it is a horror and living
and dying horror. You want the world around you to drop dead,

but it never does, never will, and you know your time is up soon:

your muscles and thoughts are like potatoes, your insides like mush,

and you try to open the door, but your hands shake, you are no longer your

own keeper. You are a cat’s tail, a dog’s limb, a hollow owl,

an anchor too heavy to move, with a grass head and beard,

and puppet walk, you cry: “How do I stop!” Your heart is hardly

pumping it is almost completely plugged, soon to explode like a volcanic

eruption and when it splits, that is all that will be left.

And if you live through all this, you find out there are no secrets

to sobriety: only your will and God’s!


Note: The greatest gifts I ever received from God goes as follows: life and birth, sobriety and faith, peace with God, my mother, my wife…sleep, everything else, everything beyond this, was a bonus.

#2352 (4-16-2008)