The hidden influences were more of an amber color

       The last rays of light seep through the corner window and linger on the lone book lying in the bookcase. It is a leather-bound Bible my brother gave me decades ago, layered in dust and still around because it was something my brother gave me. Around the room paperbacks abound, novels that made the loudest sound among all the drum beats rhythmically enticing me to march to their beat. Most books I’ve read I’ve given away, the library is a pound that collects unwanted strays, but these books became family and were invited to stay: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Sheltering Sky, On the Road and Big Sur, The Naked Lunch, Haushofer’s The Wall, the poet’s prerequisite copy of Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton and a collection of Jim Morrison’s poetry. There are other books this late afternoon finds me too tired to count or collect and put back on the shelves of my book case. I do keep my DVDs of Jim Morrison’s film HWY and Alan Rickman’s The Winter Guest in a place where the sunlight never directly touches, although the same could be said about my thoughts.

          From November Nineteenth, 2013 through March Seventh, 2015 I wrote The Dark Streets of Decay and its sequel The Dark Streets of Decay: The Extended Version and if you have read these two books you would understand why these other writers are my family. My only active addiction right now is caffeine and sobriety suppresses my supplications to the accidental atoms that congealed into a material measurement of madness and mayhem. I know I could twinge, go off on a binge, get lost on the fringe till my senses are singed by Layne Staley’s syringe, but for now I will cringe and cower on front porches near garden bowers and realize I am made ambulatory by my ambiguity. The Dark Streets of Decay set me free, I leveled the playing field to you and me with no expectation that anything is to be. It is how I am surviving sobriety because the only thing I choose to change is the content of what is curled by my hand and lifted to my lips.

          This isn’t an act of repentance, this is just me not drinking, no claim to fame, no feelings of shame, nothing else to change, letting my madness make me momentary perfecting the addict’s adage of “one day at a time”. I am not a crime and drinking isn’t criminal but I got tired of doing time where perception is subliminal.

 

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