What I Know Can’t Save Me

Photo: “Pompeii” by Reena Walkling

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What I know can’t save me
‘cause I’m an idiot for thinking
knowledge trumps humility
or that clout in any way
approaches serenity.
Smarts
 work on apps
and counting 
stars
but they never were of
much help in naming what
this heart’s door truly opens.

If the soul’s a slippery 
fish
somewhere under 
the left arm,
the brain’s 
a southbound Judas
on the take–
betraying any sooth
for three shots of Jaeger,
a Byron on the make
whose poetry’s pure rape.

Like this guy Kevin
who always lectured us
in AA meetings about how
he was a recovered drunk,
cured through what he
learned from old timers
who
 knew what they were doing,
teaching him how to
 do the Steps
the only proper way, exactly
the way 
the rest of us didn’t,
apparently, have the smarts
to understand.

I really don’t know why
he
 sat there in the meetings
except to wait for his
turn
to tell us didn’t know shit
about the really 
big stuff,
you know, the truth.

He might have been
more convincing had he
 not
always seemed so damn 
angry,
almost petulant, 
alone against
even AA’s
 core powerlessness
with 
that perfected thought of his.

Kevin had been sober maybe
fifteen years last October
when he vanished from 
meetings.
A month later I heard then he’d
“gone out,” 
AA’s euphemism
for falling
 back into the bottle.

Months later an older member
I always
 liked because he still says
he doesn’t know that much
told me he’d been trying 
to get
his old friend Kevin 
to come back,
telling 
him it was safe,
he
 was needed, that 
he
couldn’t survive
 alone out there.

One day Kevin showed 
up
at the club looking
 erased
and angry and glum.
 He never
admitted he’d been drinking,
and when he 
shared in the
meeting
he still talked as if
he knew it all even
better than before.

But those confident words
weren’t his any more.
His eyes had that thousand-yard-
stare of the lost and his voice
had not body in its timbre,
unhinged
 from what once was
Kevin,
 the way sometimes
the life and its
 truths can’t
quite meet in
 the person any more.

After a week or so of
 meetings
Kevin disappeared 
for good.
Then last week 
someone got
a phone call
 from his sister
who
 was calling all the numbers
on the cellphone 
found next
to his body. He’d been dead
at least two weeks –- talk about
burned bridges.

News of Kevin’s death spread
through our AA club like a chill.
I knew him well enough
to feel
keenly the loss—Iiked the guy,
appreciated 
his hard approach
to 
seriousness about the program

–not quite my style, but 
still helpful
to the newcomer
 and in the end
that’s all that counts—

how much had once
 been there,
how much now was forever lost.

No alcoholic death is
 ever wasted,
AA’s say;
 always there’s something
gleaned from loss. (It’s
the same with living
 on with
all those bad
 nights at last behind you;
once surrendered, 
that millstone
slowly changes 
into wings.)

My take is this: Once you
 think
you know your
 madness better
than
 your fellow loonies
it’s got you
 by the throat.

I haven’t heard yet 
if Kevin died
of suicide 
the slow or fast way
-– whether he drank himself to death
or put just put gun in his mouth.

It really doesn’t matter
 since
alcoholism claims 
its kin
either way (often both),
 having
convinced the large
 majority
–– about 90 percent  
– that
dead drunk
 is the smarter door
than living sober.

Far wiser to be the fool 
who lives
like he’s learning
 how to breathe
every next moment, 
never finished
in the 
education, always growing,
never knowing enough to stop.

When I think now of Kevin 
and
what he used to say 
and how he died
I think that a pickled brain’s convictions
are like tridents from the 
drink,
madness disguised
as thought
with hooks to
 haul us back to brine.

The only chance of
 reprieve
from doom
 is to say with these lips
the way I think it is
is not the way it is at all
and make it mantra,
a lifelong surrender
to truths I’ll never own.

Anchorites of old climbed
into tiny coracles and cast
themselves 
to the wave,
trusting their God to take them
to
the furthest shores of Destiny.

This wasn’t the poem I 
thought
I’d write
 but it’s where I ended
in this coracle of truth:
a grain of salt 
to keep me from
the guy so smart 
he’d rather die
than change his mind
 and did,
so convinced his truth
 was not
booze talking 
it dragged him
back down malt’s ooze
correcting us all the way.

February 2012

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Submitted to d’Verse Poets’ Viusal-eyes-ing Challenge.