SOBER DOSE
Pray in responsible grace; there’s an awful-view race going on damned-shacks a bit from the barley. And to cryptograph-sanctify the rain, plush in gnarly. Debriefing:
Quarter of a hamlet ostematized for His Grace, whose story was not all too storied. It went something like: he died; he was reborn; he lived his life again. And that was really all. But come time for the neverence to pentuate, hivvered boss orbied. Lay sue-line and ared ventuate. Nosthimus. Rang.
Tell us, little geode, what a crack at this is. Tell us for a while what a want’s to show. When all this golden-vined laureling brings us is gobbledygook again and again and there isn’t anything but laislelit bendadish in sight of here. And our crabby palms are weeping and arms growing weak holding aloft haggard orange boxes for the treb to shrike. When our drug is our affiliation and to use is to sanctify the gloried mind—oh. Tell us where to go from here, that we may not be as lost as we were or we are now, oh. Help us out of the muck, if you will, please. Candidate furyon lay last a stone’s throw melding galvanized shavers’ chrome. Holy Book in buoyant tear afreak upon the ocean’s wavy wavy waves, atear. Tearing up eyelike the saltwater veins going high-friction ambient flow out of the ducts to the mental stimulants’ halo glow. Around my crown driving up to the stop light fixed well in my path from the cop car shining its lights on me. Heart abeating a-hundred-thuds-a-minute. Gums freshly numbed; car key freshly gummed humming rightonward in the ignition. Can’t-a-leavered strokes with death too close to call but rowdy. Hey. All the same we we-love-you’d. Right to your balmy face awakened death-fraught and asking panicked over your own breath, “have I been born again?” and us saying, “yes.”
Welts on my head my arm a scabbard for flywheel carts a jumping action in the palm again a jumping action in the actual rob-you-late overthecounter calmed. God-help-us’s given up to vertical airs half a way from grief but not actually tantalized. Called on far from the strung-out heaps of lies you tell yourselves. Happy wings on airways. Happy floating-me’s and see-you-byes. Cropped-out heads of friends you can’t remember whose lives are separate now. You never would’ve known have been alone most all your life, have always felt that way—alone. Have been alone. What kind of friend does God send the castaway all by his slef self? Sleeping idly away in his mind getting killed? What kind of a message does an angel take to that kind of man, there, castaway, wholly underpinned? What of the secret life is his to bear? Alone? All the time? Can you tell me?
What. We haven’t you’ve never. Frequently brushed with life but not soaked. Do you want to leave the house today? There’s a party going on with some sober friends at an alleyway a block away where they’re talking about the idols of their pain being very good and are sleeping better than you have in a long time and look somewhat alive and at which you stand attentive awkwardly unaware of how to posit time. Roll by your own windows. ¶ See inside your own eyes for once. Again, clearlike. Keep yourself accountable is what they say, and day by day, too, and keep coming back: it works. But you don’t know. You might rather not go there the perceived hind of the squalid selfbrained mind all crumpled up in and on itself. What do you think we were doing here, out on the bardo? There were spirits where there were tantrizined tines. There were whole commitments to the pallored fell where not one eye had shined. Calm calm roll us back there. Where we can. Keep us out of mind. Keep us safe with you. Keep us cauterized off from the main body; we are safe-safe-safe with you. There are ghosts in your eyes sometimes I don’t see but which when I do smile like scary things up out at me and I have to flinch for a moment because I am not in my own mind. ¶ There are sevens and threes and ones and zeroes in your blue finds. Trillions of andromedas getting spilled out like a lock on lines. Quality Sanskrit dozen-acre’d blossoming clots of fuse powdered going sparkling up in smoke the halving of fire. ¶ Tell us why a billion years from now no one will have the time. They will be born and age instantly and die, because it will be moving so quick. And just enough time will shoot past their brains that they can comprehend some of the light going on around them they can sense somehow but only just enough time. And then gone, all these sacred lists of terror. You have up in your head the theory you know what is going on. It haunts you for long whiles and does not let off that button in your brain which says to doubt yourself. There is as crummy dichotomized ang-fly going buzzing up into the triptych of the launchingloss and hypertrophy. There are the legs of tables being spied through in the rooms of yesteryear when who-knows-what committed to a city style. And for levels of passed-down plane-throughs. There are smirks as seen from the sides on faces who wipe away their tears with napkins and don’t commit to fraudulent expression often. We who offer condolences have to pay a rite. We who commit to the offering of condolences for the unjustified and disenfranchised and off-the-road. Beaten away at by the bat of the mind. Unalevered. Unallied. Waiting the same crop-wise a campsite dusk-in-boom for the ball to drop and the sanchi to frill away the rolling I of the vowel-sound catechism. Cropping in our own eyes. Looking in through wormholes to alternate lives where we are all fulfilled and wondering at which point which decision was made that was different that originated this strange subset of reality and caused it to flourish.
Calm me down, higher hovering mind. Calm me down. Three days past my own impossession I’m already losing sense of what makes me what I am and what what I am is and why. I can no longer tell, and this hurts me. Some I wonder at the graffiti I used to pen upside the softwalled faces near elevators and distrify. I used to turn a corner, do a bump by the ledge, swig a beer, smoke a cigarette maybe light a blunt from a friend by, but either way have fun in dear. And get a sharpie marker out and mark up the soft wall and breathe and fry. I’d draw cartoon faces. Doing the deed of speaking with bubbles of speech and wade in my own acculescent spryness and dissolve into little bits of Teatree bry. I used to wither down walk away and pump up to the size of a skyscraper while the world mewed past and I’d often find myself discovered by a nosebleed I had alone in the bathroom where I could concentrate at long last on myself and things were right and things were right. I remember bar bathrooms. I remember dizzy multicolored light. I want to go back to the life I lived before all this came plummeting down all this opportunity to survive in a life that I’d like to live. Now with the sober police on my back every waking minute I wonder what I’m going to do with myself and how brightly I’ll burn out whenever I can. I wonder about a lot of things. Especially at night. The world is less busy and quieter then and I can really think, some. The whole of the world stares out at me from the palm of my upraised hand. It looks like an infinite stack of my hand on itself on itself on itself as I see through my hand on itself on itself. It looks like nothing swinging out at me at full force. Like the whole of the light of the flash of the star in the sky that most northernly shines is accustomed to, and I want my friends back. I have no friends here it feels like. I don’t want this. I kick and scream at myself at the blanket of my skin from the terrible inside. I do not want this. Anymore. Help me, God. Tell me why.