Searching for the Lighthouse

drinking bourbon,
listening to Hank Williams,

as the dark falls over the city once more,
Friday night and there’s nowhere I want to be.

only in the old couch, in the old apartment,
drinking till the end of the world, searching for
a lost highway into which to roam and speed through
the towns and cities, stopping only at the honkytonks
in order to look for the fallen angel I once saw in desert dreams.

I hear the voice of someone I barely know, just met,
and she doesn’t know not to come close,
when I’m getting drunk; she’ll learn.

bourbon; one glass down, another poured.
I’m going to bed, soon.
come to bed sober, for one motherfucking time.
a conversation from another life, when gin and glass
were the only things I needed to survive.

she’s trying to rile me up, she wants to go out,
partey, and I can’t stand people, the crowds,
the morons surrounding me. she wants to dance,
I see no beauty, nor expression, in dancing.

some get drunk on dancing, others on life.
I get drunk on gin and bourbon.
she met me drunk, she doesn’t know how I look like sober.
no one does; not even myself. I’ve forgotten how it is to
walk around without stumbling, talk without missing words,
or sentences.

and some wonder why my poems are filled with awkward lines
or half-finished sentences.

I pour another strong one, crying for the one I lost so many years ago,
drowning my desire to shoo the new one out to a dance club on her own.

when I’m drunk, baby -- I need to tell her --
leave me in my stoned haze. don’t come dragging me out of the mist.

she doesn’t understand; she just wants to dance!
I want to drink.

another ending comes too soon, I don’t believe in rehab,
in changes of heart.
I just want to drink; till the early morning hours,
till I’m petrified and blackout.

some honky-tonk angel descends upon me in my dream
and guides me away from the shithole and up unto the Bar.