Why I
Drink Red Wine
I have several possible roads to oblivion
available to me at the end of each workday –
or day of sitting around waiting for work,
composing bagatelles such as this one,
reading
mysteries, and playing computer solitaire.
I have no access to sufficiently potent opium derivatives
to achieve the objective,
and I doubt if I could afford them if I did.
Sometimes I buy whisky, but relying on it
to achieve the objective
tends to produce annoying side-effects
the next day.
I often have beer in the fridge,
but just to go with certain kinds of food –
drinking more than two or three beers makes me feel bloated,
and the kinds of beer that I like cost too much.
Anyway, as one of the most accomplished drinkers
who ever wrote brilliantly
once told me,
wine provides the most bang for the buck.
Since I occupy the price-sensitive segment of the market,
I buy whatever varietal is cheapest that week at the Pak’n Save,
and I discovered long ago that cheap red wine
tends to be more drinkable, to my taste, than cheap white.
My Churchkey
I’ve had it since I was in high
school,
a plain steel
can-and-bottle-opener of the old type:
one end angled down and sharply
pointed
to open the archaic steel
pre-pop-top beer cans
that were all we had back then,
and at the other end a flat
hook
ideal for opening beer bottles.
The logos of some long-ago beer
brands
decorate the 7-cm handle between these
functional ends.
Beer occupied a large part of
my consciousness
when I was in high school.
We called these things
‘churchkeys’
and I call my treasured relic the same.
Kiwis, of course, prefer to open beer bottles,
the ones without twist-off caps,
using a Bic lighter
or something similar.
My friend always declines my offer
of the use of my sacred churchkey,
because he likes
his Bic lighter more.
I try not to let this hurt my feelings.
Oh,
Cheap Wine
Oh, cheap wine, caress me!
No one else wants to.
Oh, cheap wine, comfort me
when the waking nightmares
of my minority torture me.
No one else wants to.
Oh, cheap wine, make love to me!
Make my mind and body
relaxed enough for sleep.
No one else wants to.
Sympathy,
Reassurance, and Support
I ain’t too well-wrapped,
that’s no secret,
and sometimes when I encounter
the mental-disorder triggers
that profusely litter both my
environment
and the endless crannies of my
brain,
my mind careers out of control
taking me to terrifying ports
of call
where sniggering tormentors
thrash my being
with pain and emptiness and
unbearable
self-loathing.
At these times I disgust myself
both for craving and for having no access to
sympathy, reassurance, and support
– comfort is beyond my comprehension –
as I know nobody to whom I could turn
for that sort of
stuff.
The last time I tried,
before composing this,
I received in response
a snarling rebuke
and accusations
of harassment.
Alcohol helps,
of course,
but it’s been requiring
increasingly large quantities
to take me to the point
at which the agony
relents.
Raw Suffering
After having had enough of work,
I’d finished some
fusion-cuisine tacos –
using frozen chapattis
instead of those cardboard
supermarket tortillas –
and a bottle of cheap plonk,
and taken the fox terrier for a
walk using the longer route,
but when we returned it was
still ninety minutes before time
to leave home and walk to a performance.
On my standard day it would’ve
been time
to tuck into my second bottle
of plonk,
pick up my novel du jour,
put the abstract music that I
had
in the five-CD server on
Shuffle,
and drift off into oblivion,
but no –
I had to be sober enough to
perform
in two hours time
and somehow make it through
that non-working,
non-preparing-or-eating-food,
non-walking interval
in moderately full possession
of my faculties.
I switched on the music,
took a wee slug of the plonk,
and then spent the ninety
minutes trying to read
over two mugs of café au lait.
It was ninety minutes of raw
suffering.
Published Guidelines
I have from time to time in my
life
– well, more often than not,
actually –
consumed far more alcohol
on both a daily and a weekly
basis
than published guidelines
consider
to be the threshold of safety
and therefore hazardous to my
health and well-being.
And yet here I am,
an elderly person well past the
retirement age
still drinking too fucking much,
and not dead yet.
Stupidity When Blotto
I can’t stand the loneliness,
and since I managed
to understand
and acknowledge
the nature of its reality,
and gave up expecting
or, more to the point,
striving for anything else,
I’ve been drinking myself blotto
after work each day
until I can sleep.
One corollary of this
is that almost every evening
I stumble about the house
for I don’t know how long
in a dazed condition
doing things I don’t remember.
No surprise, then,
that I frequently fuck up
and do stupid shit
or clumsy shit
that renders me bemused
when I see its evidence
or consequences
in the morning.
Vini Collóquiis
out of bed before midnight
unable to sleep –
gone downstairs
when midnight passed
and tucked into
a bottle of
cheap merlot.
supporting my head in both hands,
elbows on the table –
my head
my human head
the head of a member of a species
too abominable to contemplate –
a species
so fucked up
that it makes me feel ashamed
to be human –
I’m in hell I’m in hell I’m in hell –
but the music
from my obsolete midi-system
is sublime –
How could our species create this?
Sustained Effort
Self-destructiveness
is such a waste of my time
if I’m not
gonna stay at it.
I’ll drink to that!
