The Drunks Have it Easy

This is how it goes at 22:27.
Porcelains and plastics stacked up high
eyeing me up from across the room,
but the small flies that look a lot like fleas
haven’t come yet so I laugh back.
I’ll do things when I’m good and ready.

When I was a drunk I wondered what sober people did
with their time.
Now I’m sober I wonder what sober people do
with their time.
The drunks have it easy.
You just prop up a bar
or a group of friends
and it means something.
Somehow it feels like progression or success.
The drunker you can be and still stand
the louder the applause.
The easy stuff during the day feels like a battle
the easy stuff during the night feels like a release.
It is a hero’s world.

The tough guy drunks,
a little bit older
with leather skin.
Speak with confidence
Everything is okay,
because they’re only joking.
Funny how they inspire all that awe.
The respect offered at some middle-aged
pisshead like loose change
thrown at beggars on the floor.
The edgy ones who remind us
of our nervous dispositions.

Then there’s he who waits
until absolute saturation
so he can do all the things
he wished he could do,
unaware of the blunderous
fucking state he’s in.
The Jekyll and Hyde of it all,
if only the timid stayed that way;
their inhibitions stamped into them
by the meekness of their sobriety.

I used to walk along in this fucking circus.
Three or four different versions of me
climbing out of my clown car
and now, if anyone asks me why I stopped drinking,
I have to file down my answer
until its a lie
because I know how these people get
about what they think means something to them.

…

It’s in sobriety that I understand
how successful men take their own lives.
I can’t speak for women
because I do not know them well enough.
especially now.
Now I understand what it is to be alone
without that soothing oitment
to make it all feel full of purpose.

Now the polar opposites exist at once
the hopelessness and the possibilities
the philanthropy and the wanting to see it all burn.
the open hand and the fist.
They have always been in the same place.
The fools choose sides and scorn the other.
It is easier that way.

Because sitting here
twenty eight minutes after I started
sitting here
I realise that I am just sitting here
and at times it feels impossible.
But there are moments when it makes sense
just long enough to press on,
but never long enough to know why.