Black Womb

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For years I’ve gotten up at this too-early
hour to read and write God’s plenty down,
filling these books of wild blue udder
with fin and hoof in inky-blue wonder,
in & out & round & down this mortal
town whose work and love I am.

The womb of these matinned years
has a top-side view — a scriptorium,
perhaps, chapel services in my beloved’s
conch at the edge of forever’s tide.

But from down under where truth
is more dangerous, the womb for
these labors is a bottle club at 5 a.m.,
the most dreadful harrows of bad boozing,
the fag-end of too-late hours
trying and failing to drink enough,
trolling for sirens in a blackout.

For years on nights when I just couldn’t
get enough to drink in one bad enough night
I’d end up at the Hot Line bottle club.
My alcoholic thirst on fire, drinking me
past all dregs, refusing to give up
the chance for More’s bottomless bed.

And so I would careen from the final bar’s
last call to a convenience store
just before the stroke of 2 a.m.,
there to buy a six-pack and drive on,
aiming through the yellow traffic stripes

while praying cops begone, coming at last
to a barren strip mall on a zilched
stretch of suburb gone to seed
where all the world was dead.

The laundromat & Chinese restaraunt,
nail place & paycheck loan store
were all blank and black at that hour,
the traffic on the road at that hour suspect.
All turns from the blinking traffic
lights led to housing developments
— lights which always flashed red to me,
barring entrance like the spectral angels
of my rage and fear of love.
Homes and hearths were not for me,
not while I was vampire and free.

But the Hot Line’s door was always
open, the sole nightmouth wide;
Loud disco spilled out of it with cold
a/c and smoke, high decibal and low degree
with more than a whiff of sulphur
the perfect concoction of alkie hell.
Some Lurch on steroids wardened
the door, raking in the $5 cover,
all goners welcome, bottles in hand.

A humid hymen of walled cold
seemed always to suck me back
into that black natal, embracing me
at the threshold of the last house
on a bad drunk night’s long block,
beginning far far back at happy hour
when I tried to remedy the piled-up
angst of another day of bum life
hungover from a bad night of drinking
the night before when I had failed, again,
again, to score anything sufficient
to remit, much less fill or quell,
the hundred burning holes within.

Hour after hour I’d sit on the barstool
of a watering hole I hated, that yuppie
fern bar close to my garage apartment;
sit and drink and sit and drink,
drinking down the rent money,
the new guitar money, the date money
the school- love- get-on-with-your-
fucking-life money, pulling each $20
from my wallet the way I left my
one-night stands: “I’ll call” here
meaning “I’ll pay”–tomorrow, eventually,
maybe next month, in some next life.

I drank my way through that bar
and, thus lubed for action, weaved
my way to the next and then
the next, eight hours of steady
amber drips from the booze IV,
all of it and more more more.
And the whole time I’d say nothing,
drinking gloom and hooded on
my stool, waiting for some ravishing
young voluptary in a black polka dot
dress (so I dreamt in my boozy reverie)
to come up and ask me what was wrong,
and offer consolation, asking me
to come home with her and play
together in the bared fields of the Lord.

In my cups I played out the old crime
of those awful years of my childhood
where I believed the only safe place in
the world was in my room, my head;
and there I played James Bond and
Doctor imagining all the things I here
write as the man who grew up in that
tower’s cut-off, lamp-lit room: And all
that while I learned to create I would
have given everything just for someone
to knock on that door and ask me
to come out and play. And faithful
to my damage, they wanted to play bad,
their bed become the sea-floor forest
where I once entered and never came out.

Such angst distilled down the well
of my years to those worst nights when
I ended up all the way down my pride
to the Hot Line on some Wednesday
night when no right-minded working
and/or loving Joe would or could be out so late.

But there I was, angling for a spot
in that dark bloody broken clamor
to drink my beers with time to spare
to find some pretty at long and last
to go home with and spear her,
tunny on the tines of my trident lust,
finished, dear God finished at last.

“Super Freak” shouted synth cocaine
from monster PA speakers around the
dance floor, bad disco I loathed but
suffered when what little there was
was left to the night was there
with so little time left. Half the
patrons were bar employees free at last
to party; the hour was theirs,
not mine, and I knew it, too.

There were plenty of jackals like me
in desperate sport—-we alkies are
the every bar’s life-blood. And there was
just enough very sick and damaged women
thrown in (with their unnatural hunger
for bad men) to keep us there,
drunk and burning in all-night fire.

A spinning disco ball threw icy
shard-like glitters round
the room, filled in swinging
colored lamps which bled blu noir
and carnadines over the lupine pack
dancing party-hearty on the floor;
those lights at that hour were
like the lamps of expeditioneers
reveling at how much darkness
piles up at the bottom of things.

Bottles of Jack and Ron Rico
sprawled on the tables, poured
by roaring drunks into glasses,
whiskies dark and clear which
were spiked with gusto in
an impaling thirst for freeze.

I drank my six beers searching in
vain for tail, perambling round
the room for one welcoming look.
But no one ever smiled at me
from those tables or from
the phalanx at the bar.

One night in ten nekyias in
that bottle club could I get
a girl to dance once with me,
and she was always wrapped so tight
in robes of vast remove, my need
so obvious to her I might just well
have been waving my unzipped pecker
while she danced and danced and
danced, oblivious to whoever’s shoes
hustled and stomped across from her.

But all this was small matter because
by then I was in a blackout, my
dark bone brother now in charge,
awakened from his hellwood now that
I was zonked. He didn’t give a rat’s ass
about anything but pillage, shouting
Pussy Pussy Pussy while showing off
proud canines, battening on the last
two drops from the withered black
tit of the last bad night in the world.

While the world slept on like
a wife abed upstairs, knitting back
in dreams the fretful bore wearied
by real work, by love’s sustaining
tide of difficulty, pain and woes,

I was polishing my fangs, voting
by absent proxy for Reagan & his ilk
while they polishing their bombs
and palmed fins from hucksters
all to ready to sell a piece of the
Berlin Wall for some Western
capital or a swig of the Vanities.

Saddam was burying Shiites
every morning in the white
sands left of Baghdad, ferried
from Abu Gharib where a
hangman named Sword
leapt with joy to hang
on the swinging former man
til what remained was trashed
at the bottom of History.

My stockroom waited for my
next work day just three hours
down the clock, livid in
black corporate stillness,
drumming its impatient fingers
while I refused to grow up.

While so much life was passing
I was out at sea astride an
empty longneck Bud, figuring
out how to drink the night’s entire
sea, to drown in that monstrous
black womb which one day
did give birth to me.

It was 4 a.m., 4:30, 4:45, 4:50,
ten minutes from the night’s
final closing time when that
last stroke of possibility
would fall down with a heavy
iron drone and spit me forth,
like Leviathan, back out the door.

Then I would have no where else to go
but the lonely bed I called home,
spent, broke, drunk, with no womb
yet again to park my awful seed in,
the night’s full moon now fading
in a paling sky, with only one star
left-—me—still up there crying foul.

Then would come the real danger
of driving home in the thickest
slur of drunkeness, blood alcohol
a high thermal in my scotched brain’s
thermometer, with cops in their
sleek black cars like sharks
prowling in the blur, hungry for a
bite of DUI ass, their faces hidden
behind fate’s sheer glass.

More of that later. Let’s remain
on the night’s side a while longer,
right near closing time
in the worst fucking bar
in the world where we few
who were still going at it
were drinking everything in sight,
helping ourselves to bottles left
on tables while their owners
were on the dance floor or
were sprawled out beneath
the booths passed out. Drained
the drinks too, spitting out
gum and butts.

In the john it was pure shrieking hell,
vomit in huge sprays across stall-doors
with toilets covered with shit and piss,
a huge webbed crack in the mirror where
someone fisted their own likeness,
the towel dispenser gone, ripped off
and thrown in red ecstasy maybe
years ago, the floor agleam with
coke mixed in the piss and puke.
Iíd pee and get the hell on outta
there, shielding my eyes from my face.
Not yet, not yet, not here, I’d plead.

Coming out all the overhead lights were
just coming on, revealing a horrorshow of
low-bottom drunks all shuffling out
of one hell into the worst maw of
the night, the one we just couldn’t
accept, not that night, perhaps ever.
I’d have a half hour to get home,
praying to stay awake and on the road
and between the lines and out of sight
of cops: An hour there to sleep perchance
and then drag my ass up for work.

Always that long and heavy sigh as I
shuffled to my car, giving up the ghost of
drinking’s dream at last, at least
for that night. Climbed in my worn-out
car (a image in my dreams back then)
and turned the key in the ignition,
hoping it would start this
once and final time. Gurgling gears,
a splutter, the a gargled roar
and I was on my way home at least.

Then came the DUI, the judge who
set me on my way to AA where I
proved ready to stay. And then I
I started getting up very early,
greeting from the other side
the latest hours of my Hot Line nights,
the hour just as dark and saturate
but no longer torn or burning, not
in the same way at least, having
distilled down to this dark pen

where I write the awfulness of things
giving birth to all they meant to sing
and did when I learned that
surrender was the only escape,
the only glass worth lifting
to lips pursed in that black womb
desperate for one final kiss
and finding only whiskey’s savor—
darkness devoured by blackout,
my black womb’s drowning labor.

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Submitted for d’Verse Poets’ Open Link Night #29.