Drinking Poems

He sleeps like the winter sun,
the only source of heat
in bed beside me.

It comes on gently, softly
tiptoeing across the grounds
until it makes its big pronouncement.
Where he is, I'd never disturb.

He calls me "angel" but
I go places
no angel should.
When I crawl under the covers,
I see him shiver
like leaves in the frost.

Only a few more hours
of his warmth so I
never do sleep.

If I didn't burn these bridges
how would I light
my way forward?

Oh vanity is the enemy
of the entire
human race.

Adam said, "I'll take a taste"
and Eve put that loaded needle
straight into his outstretched arm.
"You asked for it."

And isn't that the way
that it is with sin?
You answer the call,
invite it in,
pour it tea and ask
"Sugar? Or Cream?"

With such subtlety
it lays down to bed you
and with an eager anticipation,
you pull down the sheets.
Come morning, come every corning
from here on out.
you'll know either guilt or
vengeance
or perversion.

Or
if you're quite accustomed to sin -
nothing, nothing at all.
Its when I feel the latter
that I need to wipe the slate clean,
wipe my slate clean -
the one illegible with crowded tales of
deceit writ by
two bloodied hands.

That's when I sneak out of
the bed.
So quiet
(like a snake is quiet)
when sin is sleeping soundly
arm around me or not.

Crawling off, knowing
the path to past must be
obliterated.

Burn! Burn, vanity!
Burn, my former self!
And the road before me
glows from the blaze,
lava orange sky;
my stomach burns like bad liquor
and the voice on the breeze
reminding me:
sin is only a bridge away.

The tears are different
from the last time,
less salt
more blood,
when a girl's desires
become a woman's promise.

Expectation is a vacuum,
a slow suffocation of reality.
The words disjointed
like my crooked thoughts,
the sentences as aimless
as my own life.

Being is more than I
signed up for -
I didn't have a choice.

My life was never my own.
Birthed by rebellion
an reared by resentment
I am completely aware that I
am someone else's Consequence.

A punishment for defiance,
retribution for heartlessness,
a tunnel into blackness
is what remains of that past
(and it is past).

A person treated as an object
is enslaved
by their inanimateness

But with spite,
I found my feet
and stumbled, blinded
into the
desert days.

We were lovers
before we learned to love
the way a man and woman should.
I remember your eyes
forest filter,
slick with tears that left
their tracks of ownership
down your face so sublime

You, an ivory tower
in my warfield of regrets.
Watch me now with the
bayonet of your indifference.
Squirming as you walk into my room,
its hard for you to see me
cauterize my wounds.

And I, your wild, impetuous tide,
rise and fall of howling,
I, a stream you had to pass to visit
the Land of
Manhood.

Yes, I'm still waiting for
a postcard,
wondering if the paper will hold
the charge of your fingertips,
if I might be fused with you
again
by a single epithelial.

I take a single cell
until I take your all,
swallow your soul -
down the hatch -
to keep it from me.

Like mother luna
fat and breastfeeding the hills
with milk white light,
we are swallowed by a love
too big
just for us
- us, kids, crying in the green filtered afternoon -
but integral like the creeks that
feed the estuaries,
like the ebb and flow of
la mer.

You never wanted to touch me
though I longer for it so much.
Tell me did you fear my fever,
or that I might combust?

Crying over a pile of laundry
heavy sobs -
I didn't separate
lights from darks.
And isn't that just like
my life?

Colors bleed - depression gray,
nostalgia periwinkle, soft
love persimmon, lost love ocher -
until the emotions bloody,
muddy their premises.

A soup of sorrows with
no discernible
ingredients of joy or woe,
exists.

Last place, she pursues the chase,
iron black resolve
draped around her like a cloak,
a talisman against evil,
when last place is the
first place
she lifts off from.
And the sparks as she struts
illuminate the atmosphere, a
makeshift halo about her.
She fights a good fight,
keeps her lips sealed tight
to let her life speak for her.
Because last place is the
first place
she will thrive.

The foam spills over,
a gush of froth
cannot be contained -
guilt.

And it streams out of
its perfect, proportional container
expanding and corrupting
ever delicate thing it touches -
my remorse.

But I drink it up
flat now flavorless,
let it sear my stomach,
locked in to process, to decay.

And my mouth fills
with the aftershock;
no matter how I wretch -
its in me.

Sunlight floods a sky
dyed cool cobalt
like a powder flash -
a seeming artificial day.
The world smells of plastic,
all new toy and inflatable
vinyl-scented, it
numbs my mind,
flushes out the anxiety
so prone to infect
my feeble consciousness.
Leaves bare or green on
full-limbed trees
brighter than I've ever seen,
some neon pseudo-nuclear glow
makes my bright, over-alert eyes
seem dark and corrosive
in spite of themselves.
But the glittering water before me
looks like glass
rippling with seismic waves,
an aquamarine to crystalline,
too absent of leaves of debris
to be anything except a prop.
My brain buzzes with the
promise of evacuation,
a hopeful static like
the constant humming of bees;
they crash against my
gray matter
but never sting.
And some voices ding from behind
cries like crows,
fully swallowed souls -
children as nuisances
splash the too cold water
on my unfairly toned calves
but the music turns louder
and the din makes a
new buzzing
underneath the flashlight sun.
And if this afternoon is
artificial,
evacuated,
I don't want to know

I can't get past a stanza,
haven't been able to for
three

whole years.

3 whole years of
emotional irritation, of
mental constipation, of
physical inundation of the burden of mediocrity.

And normality is
not so bad.
No struggle, no hate,

no longing here.

No, normality is
not so bad.
But its only

a stanza long.

Drinking Poems

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