in the early days on a sunny street

I’m not doing O.K.; I’m still not drinking, but goddamn, was that really the problem? I feel overwhelmed; the tides swell and drench mocking my effort to be dry. What is it that I want to do? I don’t want to be drunk so I don’t drink, it’s that simple, but nothing else is so easily solved. I’m lonely and I crave conversation, but invocations are all anyone can invent, so my time is spent pretending I am someone who prefers to be alone.

          Chilled to the bone I remember in my youth I was prone to running up and down the cul-de-sac in the summer heat where my friends and I would sustain by sipping from a garden hose, we were all gonna be somebody. I’m a long way from that surround sound of suburban houses and the problem isn’t what I didn’t become but what I did. For decades I thrived in the hive of unveiling the spiritual while still corporeal, unattained and profane I impaled myself on the analysis of atheism and the existential egress that if there is no one to impress then there is nothing left to guess, but even in my preponderances of the pointless I am still the same old boy I use to be, dreaming of a reality where I matter enough to be loved and not contained in this cell where I curtail everything that is me in order to be what you need me to be in order for you to be with me; my definition of being free. As the poet said, “Jesus loves me more than I know, but not as much as I need.”
          But like these O’Douls and now empty bar stools I am an imitation immersed in the imagination of an immaculate conception. God sends an angel at the inception to seduce with secrets and terrible lies until I look up at the endless blue sky and wonder why I am yearning for something that can’t be defined or might not be real, but when love is something you steal you just cannot feel you have earned it and thereby don’t deserve it; and at the center of it all is the self and the person who loves me least of all is me, and therein lies the real problem. It has nothing to do with what is in view, I just want to shed this skin, be born again as anything other than me; and I have never understood the madness of Layne Staley, Edgar Allan Poe, James Douglas Morrison, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson as clearly as I do right now.

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