Bottle Rotten '95

I bottle up my terrors

in self-prescribed libations

while drying out the night sweats

on a clothesline called the bar.

I sing the body electric

in a bathtub with a vacuum cleaner

praying that the fuse blows

me straight into the light.

I walk through my conscious laughter

into hazy ragged dreamscapes

of yesteryears gone haywire

and tomorrows not to come.

I huddle half nervously

near the bottle in front of me,

doubting its superiority

to a frontal lobotomy;

still, this kid's shaking safe

in her burning peptic embrace.

The Breathing End of Oblivion

For Brooke and her other aliases circa 1993.

Disarming not discerning, she softly cracks me wise.

I open melting repose in the corner, rising.

Fallen among the throng in this Passyunk go-go dive,

I drink away the dank and the military industrial blood on my hands.

Drowning out the shipyard with a chaser, warming.

She tends bar usually, though sometimes she dances;

always wry with her musing (bloody hands of her own, stained merely by her presence).

And with all that, her jukebox selection is singular, defining.

Wondering around her reflection in Absolut refraction,

a wide eyed drive toward desolation foregone, yet not begun.

I order another round silently, flying.

We share unlikely sensibilities: musical, political, magical, destructible;

cynicism burning us alive, aspirations chilled to the bone.

 She slides me one on the house, smiling.

We find we're both hiding from who we are, what we do to get by;

our ideals beyond reach, beyond our reason.

Reasoning it's for the best, swallowing.

She's post-modern Center City mostly: college and Revival, Khyber hipster friends;

in fear her South Philly ballet weeknights will come to light to them:

grunge-lit on-high disapproval.

She locks up for the evening, transposing personalities; shifting.

I live in her vicinity, in trepidation;

my workaday hypocrisy spilling into the rest of me.

I found her in one masquerade, she led me to the other, city weekends both wondrous and fleeting.

We were taut to tearing from the get-go, nervously.

It can't, doesn't last; turns to sand in my fingers, into dust.

Across the divide from Darien back to Monroe alone, empty; shivering.

Compromises personified, potential anesthetized;

she's at long last transcended these things, living.

I still languish within, haunted;

balancing off a bar stool on the breathing end of oblivion, waiting.

Waiting.