Whiskey Fixes Everything

Bar doors crack open  
the way stale beer nuts crunch  
beneath your teeth  
a scatter of broken dreams
that fled their drinking buddies  
then melted to the door-seals trying to escape  
 
a fluro light flickers  
static buzz  
the way your brain wires after  
the first couple  
where senses dial themselves to 11  
and whiskey feels like your soul  
glowing warm in the centre of your chest  
just to the right of your heart  
 
the grime and grit  
go down like a cheap prostitute  
one that swallows for the right dollar  
tells you  
she loves you with  
the dead eyes of a shark  
her hand on your wallet  
 
this is where you drink  
to bury the thousand miles  
of sadness that scatter your past  
as you killed of every ounce of potential  
on the way to nihilism  
marched it up hill toward  
a machine gun nest  
in its underwear  
expecting nothing to survive  
 
but  
whiskey does  
he walks up that hill  
in his slow trudging way  
you pray he takes one to the head  
but  
he always fucking makes it  
so you raise a round to him  
 
and it’s 11:15 am  
A quarter of a way  
between half way to no when  
I sidle up and order the cheapest beer  
trying to warm  
my bones  
fill my belly with the melancholy  
only barflies understand  
 
barmaid pulls the tap  
and amber gold  
wets the glass in a cascade of foam  
ambrosia  
man I can convince myself  
of some poetic shit when the shakes  
start up  

I turn sipping my drink

notice her staring at the  
fake wood veneer  
the type you can wipe forever  
but the tacky surface never lifts  
because it’s feeding on the subtle  
ache of memories gone freight train  
 
there is sadness in her  
that catches my breath  
in all the beauty of my own madness  
she echoes a resonance of  
seen too much  
felt too much  
beaten despair with the fractured sense  
of her own self loathing  
trying to drown everything  
in the distorted lens  
that concaves the bottom of a glass  
she is not classically beautiful  
but she is my kind of beautiful  
 
the broken haunted kind  
where she wears the hurt of forever  
as a shroud to protect the last remnants  
of her gorgeous dreams  
the ones she whispered to her lover  
before he devoured her senses and left  
her shell shocked  
enough to drink the dregs of life  
from the bitterness of an ashtray  

In the smoke around her  
she looks like a deity  
promising salvation  
 
I could love her  
till she destroyed me  
but I’m damned enough  
so I order  
my whiskey  
hug it from the inside  
dream of picket fences  
on fire  
turn my back to the tears  
to her humanity  
and try to swallow my own