A wish for wings that worked

My mouth is throbbing. No booze is not enough - it's not enough to not hurt, it's not enough to not wake up dry and feeling hungover every morning, it's not enough to not forget most of everything that happened the night before. It makes me feel like it's pointless to have stopped.

Except, of course, it's not. I'm enjoying this. Enjoying the power, the control. I feel like I'm getting away with something. Or hiding from somebody.

Sometimes I say I just want to be able to drink like a normal adult, not binge drink, but that's not true. I love the steady flow of cup to mouth, no breaks. Drink til it's done, whatever done has come to mean on that particular night.

Tonight, it's what I want. Except now when I get the urge to drink my face off, I don't. I don't know why. It's like I don't get around to it or something. It's too much work. The headache comes on too fast. I've lost my tolerance, and I know how bad it will feel before I get it back. But no, it has nothing to do with that. I don't care what it will feel like later. It seems like an old trick that I know won't work anymore. I could try, but I know it just wouldn't be the same.

Old Poem: The Cat

Dark outside, lightning flashes. I watch through the window, pause.

There was nothing there to curb this calm, and I wandered through the house, a cat at my feet.

The storm rises. The cat howls. The storm abates. The night breathes in steady rhythms.

When I wake, it is dawn. The cat is asleep on my chest. I move for air.

Outside, rain pools on concrete steps. The cat hides in the corner, eating a small grey bird. She eats the bird slowly, methodically, almost tenderly, as if caressing the bird with her mouth. I reach down, brush my hand over her back. She flinches and stalks away, slowly licking her teeth.

Dreaming

Last night, someone came into my yard and stole my roommate's bike. My bike wasn't locked, but they left it alone. Last night too, my friend crazy Pieter called me drunk and panicking at 3:30 am. I had just woken from a bad dream, and even though I was half asleep, half crazed, I answered the phone. He was surprised, he hadn't expected me to answer.

In my dream, I felt a piece of tooth come loose in my mouth, and as I spit it into my hand, a handful of teeth and blood came out with it. One entire tooth, perfect and whole, and too many fragments of others to keep in my hand. I tried desperately to hold onto each piece, to not lose any of it. I held them under a stream of water, to rinse away the blood, and the teeth kept falling from my hand, floating away in the faucet's stream, red and thick with mucus. I kept grasping for the pieces, trying to rescue them from the dark of the drain. Frustrated, desperate.

When I answered the phone, Pieter told me he was starving, had been for months. He said he was in trouble. I know, because he keeps telling me. He told me more, but I already know. I've been having this conversation with him, over and over, for months. Come over. I can't...

The man who wants to hurt me, the man who wants me to hurt, was in my dream. I don't remember. I need to remember. Pieter had called him, earlier that night, before he drove drunk to the casino and lost the last of his money. After I had talked to Pieter and given him the man's phone number. You can call him, I said, it's all right. He's sad. And angry. And hurting. It's okay.

He never said goodbye to me, the phone just went dead. And as I laid in bed, the phone in my hand, waiting for him to call back, I fell back into dreaming.

When my roommate woke up, she told me her night had been filled with bad dreams. In her dream, the man who wants to hurt me, the man who wants me to hurt, was in our house. In her dream, I had told her he was there because I had let him back in. She woke in terror at the fear, the waste of it all.

Of Dogs and Ghosts 

Here we have a dog who barks at ghosts, alive and otherwise. The ghosts come in droves or lurk in corners. We beat him for barking at what no one else can see, and he runs, whimpering, to the door.

Men come here to sleep, to recline in the day while the rest of us scrub toilet bowls or crawl on our knees, picking up the mangled garbage that the dog, in his restlessness, has strewn across the floor.

We scratch our fingers through their hair, dragging their dreams into weightlessness, restlessness. Eyes drugged, they wake and stumble towards the door, having never spoken a word.

Every night, we crowd into different rooms, sitting on floors and pillows and beds and staring out the windows at men who walk by with their hands clenched around something we take to be ourselves. The only evidence we see of our dreams is the bottles strewn across the yard.

The boxes rest in piles that reach the ceiling. They speak to no one except the dog, who stations himself in wait for one who will never come to take them away.

Sometimes we hear the door, banging with slow insistence. We fly in confused circles until we see it is only the dog, who in his sleep, is being led away.

We take pictures of ourselves, costumed in remnants of what others have left behind, sending them out through cracks in the door. “See, see?” we say, “This is what we have sent you.” “It never reached us,” they say. “We have never seen this before.”

(Note: I wrote this poem a long time ago.)