When I drink,

the ever-present pain

in my back dulls

just enough to help me forget

what it is to be human.

When I drink,

you become both

exceedingly attractive

and evermore attainable

within the same passed hour.

When I drink,

the shitty music playing

at this bar, club, hole-in-the-wall pub

takes a turn for the tolerable.

My memories of every song

I’ve ever heard become more fluid,

filling in the gaps where this track is lacking.

When I drink,

my dancing improves drastically,

both in my head and the space I fill.

The muscle spasms are likely exactly the same,

but when swung with far less reservation,

appear better, sexier, bolder.

When I drink,

my teeth tend toward numb

and my tongue unfurls to flap out

every word that’ll fly on the wind.

They propel me forward into what would

have otherwise been a night of dead seamen.

When I drink,

I become more confident, more direct,

more the person I feel I ought to be.

I’ve always been an enabler,

but only liquor lets me put the springboard

under my own feet – vaulting me forward

toward a flight that only gets more exciting

with the prospect of a bigger crash.

When I drink,

I always overlook the warning label

hidden on the bottle’s back corner.

It screams, in its loudest, tiny-print voice:

May cause delusions of grandeur.

These will be fierce, fun, and loyal,

but they will be short-lived.

The body will only turn a blind eye

to the mind’s tricks long enough to bed her.

Then he will slug himself in the gut and purge

everything that temporarily made him think

he could ever be greater

than mortal.

I

She rouses from a road bump,

spots me reading a book of poems,

and assumes me to be educated.

Her sweatshirt is rolled up like a bikini top,

unveiling her large stomach

with the pomp of a premiering vaudeville show.

She’s been unselfish since birth,

salt of the earth worth her weight in gold.

Sold down the river at her own demand,

she walked straight into our house of mourning,

wrapped her wise arms around my 11-year old frame,

and kissed my tortured mind.

She reminds me that spring is coming back for us;

we just have to spin the world a little more first.

But she’s been forgotten and forlorn,

become a run-down ghost town

whose people left her long ago in heart

before she lost them to industry.

And I write to her, to you because I loved, love, will love you

and I want to understand who you are,

who you were, and who you’re still yet to become.

Watch now how slowly a tear can form,

and then fall, when you’re crying

and think you have nothing

worth being sad about.

II

The sexiest thing you’ve ever said to me was

I want you inside me

and all my blood rushed center and down.

But you were supposed to be my sandbox, not my stone tablet;

there to make me realize how quickly I would die.

Our void grows contemptuous,

widens with each jealousy,

sprouts a new offshoot so green,

so doomed to be forgotten.

I hope your children grow up to be poets

so you’re never able to understand them.

I reread the printed letters from my lawyer,

make constellations of his patterned excuses.

I catch every person’s phone conversation

and reply to both ends, snatch their vested secrets,

could expose the truths of their youths.

But you haven’t read about me in your guidebooks,

and you’re not sure who to believe anymore.

III

Born of the same soured soil and tainted rain,

we did the only thing we knew how,

grew inward – tighter and tighter into each other,

hoping that our togetherness could save us

from the harshness of our surroundings.

But the darknesses we hold inside us –

deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –

have somehow found homes in our foreign bodies.

We are eroding within, like our lost coast,

ever crumbling into the insatiable gulf

as grown men seek a fantastical world

where their monsters obey them

and not the other way around.

She had to have heard the morning moanings

of VHS vixens through thin walls.

Shut up, shut up, sit down, and get lost

in this sitcom rerun with him for the third time today.

His self-slapped golden handcuffs keep him

tight where his boss wants him,

marionetting stability and rigidity

as our former selves fight inside to stay alive,

waiting for the worst moments

to resurrect themselves in their familiar haunts.

He couldn’t domesticate the beast with obedience;

his training just taught him to gnaw the wrong things.

We want to be brackish,

but fear what we may kill in the process –

some just can’t comprehend the water’s ways:

filled only with soft breathing and flushed skin –

the work of an inexperienced child

who’d only before fucked women

to submission in his mind.

And your elegance and innocence couldn’t save you,

not this time.

One day, they’ll understand

the power of a peaceful moment,

the courage of calming the raging storms of their souls,

the wisdom of harnessing their ferocity for greater ends.

I

Have you ever watched a fish

writhe upon a boat deck, flip-flapping

and gasping for its last breath?

We are the fish.

And it's like a little piece of myself

keeps on dying every day.

II

This is Paradise Lost –

where I used to see an oil rig,

now I see a threat.

Listen, carefully: our waters are still

mysterious to even us –

the people born extracting

our dinners from them.

But when you swim in this

long enough, you learn

to trust the bayou, believe

that it’ll always be there for you,

for your pilfering.

Like oil, you can’t see shrimp –

you have to tide and predict,

gamble what the minds of sea critters

would find most comfortable.

But now there’s a sea covered in tar mats,

and we was just playing in the water,

standing in showers of oil,

forced to leave our masks onshore –

as chemical assaults bombed our backyards.

III

Our bodies only know

so many ways to tell us

we’re sick, broken.

The crude doctors know this.

The average lifespan

of people who polished Alaska

after the Exxon Valdez spill

is five years.

All of these people are now dead.

Cover-up had to be refined

to mean clean-up once again.

IV

We did not do this to ourselves,

this was done to fuel the nation,

to break us and barren beaches.

And now we see a culture of ethical failure:

black-slathered dog-and-pony show, control

the images, the evidence of harm.

Public perception is all we have left,

but you've long since learned to deal

in misinformation, bait with plausible deniability,

cast reasonable doubt upon our shores.

It’s just the flexing

of a practiced muscle for you:

divide and conquer our communities,

pit them against one another,

let them kill themselves from within.

This is the strategy of claims war –

see how destructive money can be.

V

They say fishing

is the second oldest profession,

and it has survived so much, but this,

this smothers everything.

And I do not want

to end up

in a museum.

We never wanted your help,

or your annihilation,

but we bore the load upon our backs,

with both boom and bust.

So you must dig deep

to make us whole, Exxon.

Make us whole, BP.

Make us whole, America.

Do not forget

who the “w” is

intended for this time.

[NOTE 1: This is a found poem. The vast majority of the lines above are taken verbatim from the "Dirty Energy" documentary, which focuses on the fisher folk affected by the 2010 BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the featured personas' words were massaged to make it into this current form.]

[NOTE 2: In general, my poems tend to run far under 500 words. But this is one of my longer ones, and because I still wanted to submit this piece to this particular challenge, I've included this note at the bottom to hit the 500 word minimum. Yay.]

I

Doctor,

how much fear and tedium should a soldier swallow?

Doctor,

is this enough psychic salve to keep him fighting?

Doctor,

are you feeling alright this morning?

You must keep from cracking, for their sake.

Doctor,

I am no expert like you,

but this is mental medicine at war with itself,

the fury no one sees coming.

II

This is nothing new.

Achilles would have cried

over the body of Patroclus

on the shores of Troy

or beside the Bay of Pigs.

He would have bathed himself

in his battle-brother’s blood

with or without a priest or alchemist

showering him in magical liniments

for invisible wounds.

III

During the Civil War, the field surgeons

named it an irritable heart,

tried to quell the beaten

butterflies with bottles of young bourbon.

In World War I, we called it shell shock,

and our boys were shot for cowardice,

electroshocked for their tenaciousness.

In the Second Great War, the nightmares

were known as battle fatigue,

war neuroses, and Freud asked

if they’d shot their mothers

and if so, in which theaters,

and where the hole had borne

its way through their bodies.

The great psychs once defined PTSD

as the post-Vietnam syndrome,

and in every acid-smacked flashback,

some men return to the jungle,

some have never left.

IV

If a soldier should break down during combat,

he should be treated close to the front

because, if he is sent home,

he would do poorly

and seldom return to battle.

V

Experts are remembering and forgetting

remembering and forgetting,

never listening, never creating a lasting narrative –

no boot print to follow

out of this man-made muck.

The subtle pressures of killing

and more killing,

the tours in foreign countries,

the time spent stacking filler

for the catacombs they’re sightseeing –

overlooking that war travels home as well.

Our soldiers are holding

their machine gun minds

with flintlock hearts.

They are holding in

the stress for all of us.

[Note: Found Poem drawn from “When Soldiers Snap,” a New York Times article by Erica Goode, published 11-7-2009.]

We were delivery boys

made men

gripping permission

with privilege to hover.

We biked between

the lines of the living

and the legal.

With every pedal,

we’d bend mortal men’s physics.

Traffic’s laws never applied to us –

the road paint only confined

in white and yellow,

but we thrived in grey.

We were boundless, weightless,

limitless,

until one of us was hit,

when gravity smashed back

and we returned to being

breathless.

***

I can see you now

amidst the flashing lights

grinding gears uphill

through the snow,

the storms, the sweat.

You are splattered in city.

Break grease tattoos

on the back of your palms.

Crank and chain frayed jeans

drag inches behind you,

hold on so desperately

to their thinning threads of life.

***

Long after I’ve quit your post,

I still street-spot the others of us,

the matching, bleeding cracks

of our dried knuckles.

Still hear the manager’s

match-tip anger ignite

with only a second’s strike.

We were just ones of hundreds –

carrier pigeons on wheels –

and if we couldn’t fly fast enough,

he would hail another

to fool-flutter in,

always happy to take

someone’s crumbs

for the simple sweet

of feigned freedom.

We humans are such fragile things.

The darknesses we hold inside us –

deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –

have somehow found homes

in our foreign bodies.

We try to contain them with our weak minds,

pretending to comprehend their depths.

We camouflage them beneath our thinning flesh,

hoping the emptiness doesn’t leak out

or our false colors seep in.

But their escapes are inevitable.

Whether as a flashflood or an erected mountain,

our darknesses will make themselves known,

will have their ways with us,

will break us up to tear us down.

They’ll hold our hands as we climb higher

just to watch us fall for longer,

always waiting until we falter

near an edge to shove us over.

Then our black holes will eat us –

chew bite stab slice and swallow

until our insides are fecal and fallow –

and they will walk around

in our leftover skins,

smug shit-bags who thought we were

too good to be seized by what we hide inside.

They’ll go on pretending they’re us

until they can get close enough with someone else.

And once our decaying corpses

become too troublesome,

they’ll jump ship to their next hosts,

leaving us to rot and fester –

flailing as we fall to the ground –

slumped in a heap of ourselves:

the wasted snack of something

incomprehensibly stronger than all

our mental wrestling could ever grapple

or years of denial could ever outpace.

And so I’m left alone

wondering: what if

I’d tried to love you

rather than the warmth

of your best friend?

Would we have fireworked

just as vaingloriously,

pan-flash spark spewing

color just as quickly

as we could shed our clothes?

Or would we have bubbled

like sugar microwaved and molten,

forced into a form

we were never meant to be

shaped of or by –

the crust of our former love

crumbling everywhere in its hardness?

Or would we have brewed

like tea leaves steeped in the boil,

finally unfurling our dried tongues

preserved months ago

for someone else’s tastes,

releasing the flowers

we’d kept clenching

for no other reason

than constant reservation?

Perhaps the kettle is still,

waiting to whistle.

When you spoke of melting

pig iron into steel,

pneumatic pressed sheets

into car quarter panels,

you mouthed the words

with your thirsty hands.

Other poets only ever imagined

what you’d lived –

the poverty, the desertion,

the bitter, biting winters

you’d worked through –

the lines you penned

to honor those

who could never lift one,

despite the heft of shoulders,

the hungry bones of backs.

You were never born of ash –

it was always too clean,

too burned of its impurities

in the foundry blaze.

No, you learned to write in the muck,

to make stick make pen make word

make world make life make belief

make escape.

And when the immaculate poets

bleach their shirts for the honor

of returning you to your dust,

force them to burn

you in your first furnace,

to push you through

your factory smokestack,

and puff you out

upon the men you’d tried

to uplift, to preserve, to embalm.

Should the workers breathe in enough,

maybe the ash of you

will console

their cancers,

will convince

whatever’s eating them

from within

to work itself out.