Another Journey

two days in my bedroom, and the walls begin to close in on me. empty cans of super-strength lager stacked on the desk catch the light like cheap gold trophies. I smoke my Lucky Strikes, and the place is heavy with that blue, blessed haze.

I’m either pounding away on this typewriter or flat on my back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. the headache is back, and with it the booze rising hot to feed whatever was still burning in there. the haze thick now, but still I can see those figures twitching at the foot of the bed.

warm memories.

as the minutes pass, new faces from the bar are in my mind, half angel, half devil, standing there in the unforgiving glare of the kitchen, and I think of the howling wind over faraway barbed wire, empty frozen fields, and ice-crusted rivers.

Like Dachau, exactly like Dachau.

and then she arrives, waiting in the rain, in the storm that’s raging inside my head. at first, she stands by the window, then she’s in the room with us, dripping wet, her black hair glued to her white face. all those years were right on the other side of the glass, on the unreachable side of an invisible line. empty lager cans are left gleaming like spent shells. when I cross the line, I touch this ache that wants to lie down in that frozen mud.

I reach for another can and wait to light another cigarette.

my chest feels like it’s battered by a storm that endlessly thunders on. she waits there patiently, with the cold beauty that only death has, while the typewriter strikes become slow and arrhythmic and the lager gives a last, flat fizz.

I count the cannons,
beating through my fractured mind,
hangover raging