Lessons
     After Reading and for Fred Voss

When you all I ever wanted
was to write. I believed all the myths:
the dying young, the tragic hero, and most
of all wild nights with a bottle in my hand.
I scoffed at amount people drank to get
high, quantities I needed just to get started
on a daily high. I could surpass them all
And while it didn’t escape my notice
that the people I revered were sticking their heads
in ovens, jumping off bridges, falling off bar stools
as good as dead, death was an abstraction.
I spilled my guys on page after page,
published some too but as I grew older
it felt hollow, necessary maybe, but if
you were going to end up in a derelict shack,
hearing voices and seeing shit that could never exist
before they put you in a halfway house to
the morgue well, it became clear
that dreams did have responsibilities and
that yes, as Hemingway’s bartender told the story
of the guy who said he the dt hallucinations
were fascinating on an intellectual level but
hell, to live through. You can’t write if being
alive is worse than being dead. Yes, it was
like that for a while, being legally drunk for three
years is overrated and then afterwards, the calm
that settled in is almost unnerving; one big blank
empty space. Maybe you really did need to be drunk
to write. All those memoirs by and about drunks
suggested the same things: once you get
to the end of the last bottle there is nothing left
but darkness, the end of all things including,
the alphabet. There is nothing abstract about that.
Now that you’ve been where the dead people
go, where the inseam live, it was time to study
the ones who survived. To cultivate the calm.
No one gets out of here alive anyway, you just
Don’t have to be 27 when you go. It took me fifty
years to learn I was already too late for the party.
How do you like your green-eyed boy now, Mr. Death.

r.i.p 2/2025