Nineline Stanzas

Listening to Irish shanties while drinking American whiskeysours
I can’t handle cheap Scotch on-the-rocks
but I can think fantastic Irish brogue thoughts
of a well researched past I wish I could embrace as my own
all I can attribute to my heritage is cheap tobacco and fruitless wars
so I look to my future
an inspiring thing, unpaved and unpioneered
because to each his own, and for me and my house,
I will choose the one less traveled by

I’m killing myself on whiskey and cigarettes
Slowly, the pace I take to everything
The vices that inspire and protect me
I sit to write with a mere pint
and a pack of 20 aesthetic pre-rolled posthumous butts
(only when the pace changes in my desires)
I curse the millions of attention-grabbing attempts
when I think of my grandfather’s suicide
that robbed me of a childhood under his stern reich

(Brief intermission, boredom, then cough.)

You forget the last things first
with visions of fissions and fusions of childhood and present
clearer than your lover’s words ten minutes past
but in a world of rapid-eye-movements, the two blend together
married into one reoccurring dream
I’m drunk but thinking intricate thoughts
Camel and Marlboro detestities when London exports delicious hand-rolleds
if only I wasn’t so indolent, as America makes everything so easy
with its escalators and AMEX debtmakers

I often speak in accents when talking to myself,—
perhaps I’ve found myself banal
—my vocabulary hackneyed like some dried-up mountain spring
but I repeat shanty lines under futile moonlit skies
that, speaking in terms of sex, will never be brought to fruition
because I’m afraid of the depth her shoulderlenth hair will bring
to a life lacking necessary Hollywood feelings
and the gradual progression of sweater to skin, of Christian to sin
in the pre-ordained, posthumous world in which I unfortunately live.

I don’t have to be awake for eight more hours
so I’ll finish this whiskeysour,
as I think of all the nights falling asleep without gold satin sheets
and without a sober hand to hold through my drunken ramblings
my cigarette is lit with two embers still burning strong
a matchbook struck, burning nineteen would-be unlit matches at once
I’ll turn to mollify the concerns of my loved ones with one strong candle
a relationship glowing guiding lighthouse into the night
I’ll nap, dreaming of cigarettes and sleeping off tomorrow’s shaky hangover