Awake, For Some Reason...-Celina

Response to “Waking Up Drunk” by Tony Barnstone from Sad Jazz

Waking Up Drunk

He wakes up drunk from ugly dreams. It's hot
outside and fifty flies have slipped in through
the door. He watches them whirl and corkscrew.
His stomach does the twist. With half a heart
he swats the busy air with a dry mop,
but they divide like water, then close in
again and pirouette and roll and spin.
So much for booze. It won't make his mind stop.
"My God this sucks," he slurs, and excavates
the mini fridge. Perhaps something in there
will make it better, coffee maybe, toast.
His mind does flips, but he grabs eggs and plates
and in the copper pan a dull face stares
at him from nether worlds, a thirsty ghost.

Awake, For Some Reason…

With what certainty do we so arrogantly
curse the rain? Sure, we must slosh and trudge
through trenches of wet apathy; while in his cove
a man writhes, wrung dry by the slurry
of last night’s drunken entropy. He is a creature
fashioned from the same atomic material
that made the obsessive fruit fly. The candied wildness
of a pregnant springtime. The forgiving showers
after a summer broil. “My God this sucks,” he belches,
and pops his white tongue off the roof of his mouth,
only to pause upon that particular taste,
familiar to when he would suck pennies as a boy.
So delicately does he pinch his trembling eyelids, as he notices
another man’s face, surrounded by flies.