Sometimes I get a taste for booze. Sometimes when the sun sinks low I imagine a cold glass of beer and I can taste that first electric hit. Cold glass on my lips, fluttering evening fairies swimming through my mouth towards my low heart. A water slide for dream weavers down my gullet, laughing/carousing, splashing out of the tunnel and spilling all out into the pool of blues I call My Guts. Beer Drop Kids on rafts and inflatable sea dragons start splish-splashing around down there and right away. RIGHT AWAY. I feel fucking superb.
Nothing beats the first little sip. Especially after a tough old day. Deserve. Deserve. I kick it around. Deserve. I Deserve a beer. A drink. I've have told myself that so many times in this life that I'd be unsurprised to find out that it's tattoo'd on the inside of my chest.
Ahhh, but shit. I hardly drink much anymore. I get afraid of it. Of me. There's too much I can fuck up without the sauce in me. With it, I am toast. Don't get me wrong: I still have a drink. But not a hundred like I used to. I don't DRINK per se. Not like the young man I was.
Violet in her swing stops me in my tracks a lot. What am I gonna do if the swing starts spinning over and flipping like some 1970's neighborhood park stunt? Huh? Or if she starts shitting nonstop? Or speaking in Appalachian Tongues? You have to be ready for stuff like that. You can't be three Stellas deep and expect a hero's response. I see me in her time of need, two blocks past buzzed, hurling myself through the big bay window at the front of the house. I've come close before. Without alcohol. Should something happen when I'm all wino: I might just run. Flee.
Still, there are times when I have a splash or two of cheap red wine and the old feelings come again. Warm fires of home. Christmas innards. I look over at the swing and the Violet swinging in it and damn-it-to-hell if the whole scene isn't just euphoric. The wine I swallowed wears a tux, jacket off and saunters over across the bare dim-lit floor of the hall in my belly. He reaches into the shadow'd corner and gently pulls forth the exquisitely sexy lady who hides behind my rotting ticker: Ms. Pride. And oh: how they dance. Captain Wine and Ms. Pride moving to the sly music that oozes from my basement walls; holding one another in the night jazz; cheek brushes cheek: they near-miss kiss; then they kiss. And I feel it all inside me as I watch my little baby in her swing, sleeping. Bless her heart.
It's dumb poet crap, I know.
But, you see...that's the beauty of just a little wine. For a moment, all is revealed as true/wonderful/and real. Ms. Pride gets led out onto my dance floor. All that time spent lurking in my darkness...and it's Captain Wine who finally lures her to the faded light. Well, Captain Wine and Violet.
Ok. The real reason I wrote this was to justify me intending to drink the two glasses of red I have sitting in a bottle over on our hutch thing. I don't know if I deserve it or not. And frankly, I don't care. My daughter is in La-La Land. Her Mom will be home any sec.
First sip.
Oh dear Lord of Lambs in Daylight. So very very nice for me.