There is a debauchee inside my chest, awakened by the clanging of empty
JD and Absolut bottles, knuckles white on prison ribs.
“Personality type: drunk” is how my early twenties would be classified
in one of those medical studies they do at prestigious universities,
most likely by grad students wearing an eau de Jaeger bomb.
You were collateral damage from one of Bloomberg's greatest hits,
the Smoke Free Air Act. You become a pedestrian
caught between the end of a cigarette and my hand holding a lighter, and my dress
crumpled in the corner of the room, was just a secondary casualty from the
last cuba libre you slid across the bar at me.
I have found love, and it is spelled V-O-D-K-A. Phillip Morris International
owes Bacardi back dividends for all the cigarettes I smoked while under
the influence, and the collective male psyche should buy stock in both for
all the pussy they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
There are times in your life when anyone will do, when it's too dark to
see if there is a light in the other's eyes and when the extent of
pillow talk is me closing my eyes, weary of the miles behind me
and those yet to go, and imploring you to stop talking.
Please. Just stop talking.
Rum was my wingman, convincing everyone that there was
a light in my eyes, convincing the man who is eyeing me from
across the bar right now that I would be good enough for tonight.
The problem with sobriety is no more drunk sex, not ever again,
so this man's mannerisms and intonation get under my skin,
and I realize I'd rather be dead than go home with him tonight.
The whole thing reminds me of that last time we got together and
the moment that I sobered up beneath you in a hotel in Chelsea,
looking at myself in the mirror nailed to the ceiling above us, looking
for anything that reminded me of home, and I couldn't find it in you at all.
Instead, I found an empty liquor store bag and the
loneliness that hides in the shadows of sober living.
Inside, there was a heart throbbing in 6/8 time inside of an empty bottle of 151,
proof that if I'd cleaned up a long time ago, I'd have realized
that it was never my heart doing the talking, but the bottle,
which was never anything but
a bully in the playground of human relationships, leaving
the ground under the monkey bars riddled with glass and
leaving me too scared to do anything but hang.
