Whiskey · Poet

Oh, How Well They Wrote

Those who wrote before us are but fossils,

     imprints within swaths of stone,

We outline their poems with greedy fingers,

     This is how they must have lived,

     Oh, how well they wrote!

But can you feel them breathing

from decaying lungs,

Do their poems celebrate today,

or lie lifeless on aged limestone?

We find no now, only the then

of antiquated times read in

the words we now sequester from

their hardbound elegiac tombstone.

     Oh, how well they wrote,

     That was how they must have lived,

We close our tome, breathe deeply

return our poet to the dead,

     bury them again,

     breathe deeply

and pick up our pen.

12 Step Bourbon

Thomas Abrams scans the room timidly.  Coffee pots brew to the left, a cigarette circle to the right, and a pint of Jim Beam sits on every other chair.  A 750mL bottle of Kahlua stands beside the percolator as a mix-in salvation for coffee.  Thomas’s eyes nervously pan back across the room suspicious of the smiling faces smoking and chatting about with unpleasant vocabularies.  He wonders, despite his theocratic urges, if he should pour himself a drink.

He hadn’t seen the signs.  His mother, a devout catholic, and his father, more of a social Christian—holidays and baptisms—both increased his risk factor.  Jesus, even Buddhism is considered a religion anymore--call it a philosophy, or belief system, or gateway religion, but it always leads to harder spirituality. 

Thomas was here because his own religion had alienated him from his personal and professional life.  He worshiped daily without consideration for his secular expectations.  Thomas could not even eat without praying.  He was caught, eventually, praying in public, a “Class B” misdemeanor, for which he now is serving a requirement of his sentence. 

Sitting in a folding metal chair at Religions Anonymous Local #776, Thomas reads over a pamphlet on his new path.  It states that there is something tangible, more powerful than he, something that could make him realize and come to terms with his normal defects, that he does not have to harm others for his existential beliefs, nor alienate, but they could lead him, with the right alcohol and mixer, to a more meditative, compassionate, true understanding of the world and his life.  He shrugs his eyebrows, imagining what he could learn from a hangover.

Thomas leans forward in his seat, head down, resists the urge to pray, but thinks of Jesus turning water into wine.  He inhales a cup of coffee to chase his first shot.  His path begins; he takes another.  Ten more to salvation.

Blue Jean Dustbowl

No drought is so tiredly scorching nor
hopelessly lonely
exasperating as

the drop of sweat
sweltering on
the brown leather wrinkle of his forehead

no field so dry with red dust
blowing across bleached rabbit bones
dead in search of some glint of green life

as his arid weathered hands
feeling
empty pockets
he watches through storefront windows 
the plentitude of food
on the shelves.

We are the stew

     Dinner scraps dumped into this 
          metropolis broth
          overly spiced, cayenne and garlic
     boil
          stir occasionally

served for lunch.