Category: Existentialist Drinking Poems

Films in Black and White

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That night you did not see what you think you saw, scenes from your own life played out in black and white on the washroom stall wall.  Sitting on the toilet seat, you leaned your head against the door.  While the other girls took turns coming to check on you, you watched yourself in pigtails eating popsicles and playing dolls while club beats beat out minutes you’d never noticed going by.

Words about the Drunk Man Climbing the Fence

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Part of it was the wind making waves of his oversized sweatshirt, and some of it had to do with the drips of drool dampening the expletives that came spewing from his mouth.  His mouth like a hole in his flesh.  But it wasn’t just that that brought on our sadness.  It was something more to do with the pedestrian unpleasantness of surviving another November that struck us so deeply as we watched the man, head ways on one side of the fence, feet ways on the other and his shirt sleeve caught in a wire spike at the top.

It had been November a lot lately.  Another box on the calendar, but every day in the same month as the day before.

We held our bottom lips between our teeth, wanting to weep, but not knowing how as the man’s head dipped dangerously towards the ground and his left leg lifted like the mast of a sinking ship.

We waited with the good will and patience we hadn’t had that afternoon while wading though subway traffic or talking with our mothers on the telephone.  Once in our lives we were wishing for something outside of ourselves to succeed, and we hoped that for that moment at least, it would be enough.

Visit

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Walking around in your parent’s house, that place where you became human, you’ve been gone so long you see ghosts of yourself, back from when you couldn’t reach the cupboards, a little girl in shadow form and a blue dress, still stretching for the cups, and the stories you made up for the women in the bathroom wallpaper slice with the memories of when you were three and coated your hair in Vaseline and when you were thirteen and lay your head on the toilet seat throwing up beer and barbeque chips, time folding in on itself like a paper crane that refuses to fly.

Metamorphosis

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Standing at the bottom of the pool, holding the weight she’s stolen from her older brother’s dumbbells, she knew she could do it this time.  She knew there were gills behind her ears, and she was waiting for them to open up.

Looking up, she saw the shadow of a tree dropping dead leaves onto the surface of the pool, sunrays slicing through the water and the murky outline of her mother, no doubt looking worried, at the edge.

She was only eight, but old enough to know there’d been some mistake.  She’d watched the other kids throw balls and play dolls and the way her father drove to work each day and came home huffing.  She’d heard about a man that was always supposed to be a man but was born a little girl by mistake, and she thought for sure that she was supposed to be a fish.

But her lungs were like lead at the bottom of the pool as she willed the back of her head to open up and take a breath.  How wonderful it would be to breathe that chlorine filled water that was stinging her eyes and little drips of it leaking into her nose.

She needed so badly to breathe, but she knew if she just stayed down there long enough, her body would have no choice but to become a shark or an octopus or a minnow at least.

Head and Shoulders

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The band was from Barrie, Ontario, and they were exactly like a band from Barrie, Ontario, their songs about women, their voices like diesel, their ripped jeans and the bassist’s long hair.  It was hair commercial hair, maybe even better.  The only way to describe it is to say that on those nights, the ones when a single cockroach climbs from your heart and lands on your palm, and you’re left sitting on your single bed on greasy sheets with a single streetlight to illuminate what just crawled out of you, that is the kind of hair, smelling of head and shoulders, that you long to cry into.  I would date that man just for a chance to cry into his glorious golden hair.

Anthem

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Let’s get drunk and sing the national anthem, like we did when we were kids, hands on our hearts, hats at our feet, facing the flag pole in the freezing cold, when our faces were faucets, pouring snot and obedience, before this urge to fuck things up overtook us.

Paul Simon

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We were getting ready for the party, drinking wine and listening to Paul Simon.  We both just loved Paul Simon all of a sudden.  I went to put the appetizers in the oven, and when I got back, she was crying.

“Hey,” I said.  “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?”

She said sometimes she loves Paul Simon so much she has to cry.

She was drunk.  She was laughing and crying at the same time like they do in the movies.  She was wearing the dress I’d bought for myself, but she was right, it did look better on her.

I sat beside her on the couch.

“Did you want to marry Paul Simon instead?” I asked.

“I think he’s already married.” She said.

I crossed my legs over hers on the coffee table.

“It’s just I don’t think anyone can make me as happy as Paul Simon does.  You don’t make me as happy as Paul Simon does.”

She was crying for real now.

I heard the timer on the oven go off.

“What can I do to make you happier?”

“This isn’t about you.  You always think things are about you.  This is about me and Paul.”

I went into the kitchen to flip the cheese sticks from the oven onto their backs.

“People will be here soon.  What do you want to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know anything.  Maybe we shouldn’t even get married.”

“How about we have some water and eat the good snacks before the guests get here?”

“That sounds good.”

“And I’m going to turn off Paul Simon for a bit.”

“Please don’t,” she said.  “He’s the only one that makes me happy.”

Water Bed

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I wasn’t sure why I was there, staring at his body covered in bandages the colour of innocence, only a few human fingers sticking from the fabric and itching for a cigarette.

“He could have died,” his mother said, savouring the words and the effect they no doubt had on all of her guests.

I was still holding the casserole my mum had made, trying to peek through the plastic sheets to the part of the house where the fire had been.

My mum made a sound with the back of her throat and neither of us unbuttoned our coats.

“He could have died,” his mother said again.  “Thank God it was a water bed.”

“He could have burned the whole block down,” my mum had said the night before.  “What was he doing smoking in his poor mother’s bed?”

What was he doing in his poor mother’s bed.  I wanted to know.

Fire Escape

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Fire Escape

I want to tell you about the man standing
on the third floor fire escape, staring through
his round-rimmed glasses, through the window,
in at me.

I am waiting for him to jump.

What will his body be like after sliding
though through two floors of empty air?
Will they bury it or burn it?  His cousins
driving all-night from Utah to watch it happen,
then all night home again to tell
their families it was real.  Or will he lie,
sexy and limp with his arms out-stretched,
still alive, but like a just-crucified
version of himself?  Or, more awful still,
will he walk away, unscathed, leaving me
the only witness to his misery?

This abyss is too easily discussed, to weep
about the watery oatmeal our mothers made
when we were children, to speak so earnestly
about the holes in our socks and the wasted way
we tie our shoes each day.

We know we are not as deranged as we think we are.
We are not gods, and we are not humans.
Our sadness is artificial, but it is beautiful.
It is bits of broken mirror and spoons
bent sideways using just our minds.

We are not horses.
We are not heroes.
Our hair grows
0.3mm per day,
and still they say
we are dead inside.

Alarm

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The radio on your alarm switches on at 3am, unbeckoned.  The voice of a nighttime preacher speaking forgiveness onto dead waves.  It begins in your dreams, and only later do you realize his voice is not water spilling from a crack in a brick wall.  You bring your fingers to your face, listening to the voice, which is not fire, telling you you are loved by an empty sky.  He says it with such conviction to this all-night radio audience, drunks, insomniacs, suicides and one-hundred-million precious variations of the three.  Promises spilling through static the way sadness slowly slides from a broken heart.

 
You are aware of how it will sound in the morning, when you tell your co-workers how you became a Christian, how you must pray and be good, how those unwanted answers arrived feeling so solid against the black backdrop of your midnight bedroom.  
 
But that comes later.  Now, you are sitting up.  You are pulling the blankets from your bed, the clothes from your body.  You will wash away your sins in your apartment complex swimming pool closed for fall.
 
Your brain is chandelier glass with that nighttime preacher’s words, still whispering in the background, made of light.