Dare not Keep Whiskey on the Grounds

Dare not Keep Whiskey on the Grounds

The sinking stake speared my ankles from pacing into the French Quarter

I am afraid of myself drinking, venturing alone

In a folly of contemplated bravery to imbibe praying for the glory of chance

Encounters in the sheath of shadow to scale back the curtain

Of this pressured depression, these mites crawling on my skin

At all hours pinching their microscopic maws into my dermis

Well-deep drilling for crude, reminding me I am too afraid of myself

To enact alcohol alone into my system, social overtures of

Paying a cover charge from some bottled opportunity

I ponder the breaths staring at the diameter of the circle

Inadequate and the melancholy presses in like a mechanized car crusher

My skull the watermelon bursting knowing I have not the will to venture

The sights of driving back into this trammel town, gazing at the rural pubs

The pickup trucks lining the block and the Daisy Duke limbs flopping out the door

I imagine the woman I could meet would only remind me of death in a sundress

How could any being here not smell of incestuous hillbilly taint?

As cousin or cohort, biddy basketball buddy, fifth grade friend, sophomoric confidant

All these faces choosing to reside here in paradox, how could anyone electing residency

In this quagmire magnetize to me with all my metronome neutered polarity

I have no attraction.  I am inert as plastic and nonreactive an element God has ever made

Desolation argued for and won, court case and a buried sum of choice

The dead can dance and zombies frolic in the romance of midnight revivals

Graves shovel up the dirt chucking on other bums, put on party hats and recall

The days of life drinking through sluiced skin and pork brains

I dare not keep whiskey on the grounds, bullets or holsters all too tempting and

Better kept strangers, her or me or whoever lives in the breath I have not the hope

To forgive this boy that beats his chest and prays and prays to see a skip

Of these years of this maelstrom self, believing the answer can not possibly

Be anywhere close, to any of these follies, attempting to ask and the fear of setting lips to a glass that the tender will not sell to me anyway.  Home again typing in vain, scratching these bugs scaling this flesh in legions of scents that make falling asleep a ritualistic terrorism. 

To hell with poetry, this depression is unrelenting.