GONE FROM MY GLASS
(Original Image by Gadiel Lazcano)
Still night. Still time. Still wine. Still thinking of memories past, that brain poison that never quite drains. Empty glass. Empty time. Empty wine. I need more; of what, I couldn’t tell you. I just sit here on my ledge with my mouth hanging open, my soul rolling down the contours of my tongue, words caught in wax on their way to the mind, whether yours or mine.
There’s no way to tell when or why, but you inevitably slide from lives of those around you, your communal landscape. Your brother, your sister, your master. You’re raked across the leaves. You’re swept against the dust. You’re stabbed and spun into the center of a wine cork and pulled. Function is the freedom to feel. You are valuable to others, to yourself for as long as you have it. Then, like so many dead flowers, like so many cold catalysts, you are tossed in the dumpster with a sense of disgust. And yet, we hold out our cracked chalices like common beggars. We lick the boots of those gracious enough to look our way, for they are Christ incarnate. They have given us a purpose when we had none, and that purpose is to serve them. You are but a stepping stone on their path to nirvana, and you will be treated as such. So be careful.
My wine. My love. You are gone from my glass, and I am left wanting. I must drink for all eternity lest my blood muddy and smother my veins. It’s only a heartbeat away, so pour me another. If I cannot sleep then let me dream awake that I might continue on in the land of the callous. I cannot do this on my own. I cannot see past the absurdity of it all, the absurdity in myself, for I must reach out to enemies to castigate them. I must welcome those armies of cynics and cellphone junkies to bayonet them with the rusty tip of my poet's foil.
Still night. Still time. Still water from the head of a cactus. The desert moon lifts me up, lights my way like the eye of god. Isolation is my paradise. Suffering is my profession. Dehydration is my hobby. Death is my guilty pleasure. I shuffle among the coyotes with black sand between my toes. I summon devils on the head of a pen then drag them up the highway where the red sharks sling cement and bat guts in my eyes. And I can see again.
I am a silhouette in the night, an apparition of your memory, that jagged little stepping stone you tripped upon on your way up. Remember how I cut the base of your foot? Remember how I licked my lips as I poured you into my glass and drank until nothing was left? You hypocrite, you too have taken others where they needed to be and filled them with a madness to unmake pain. And still, they left without looking back.
Enough words. Enough soul from my beggar’s bowl. I drink the empty air to our memory. I scuttle through the desert dust, drunk on dead dreams: of you walking my dusty bones once again, filling my glass with sand, and toasting to a life poorly lived. And to you, my love! And to your health! For you have revealed the dark depths of my being, and I have given you a place to fall.
