Another Journey

Two days blown out in this little bedroom cell, tins of super-strength lager stacked like golden Buddhas on the nightstand, Lucky Strikes burning one after another till the air’s thick blue holy smoke, and me pounding the keys or just staring at the ceiling where the cracks look like roads I’ll never take.

Headache again, that sweet brutal drum behind the eyes, alcohol surging up like gasoline on the fire of whatever’s left of the soul, inspiring, always inspiring, the haze rolling in, the frightful hallucinations dancing on the edge of the mattress.

Warm sentiments, new friends I met in some bar that turned into angels and devils both, laughing in the kitchen light, and visions of cold places, ice fields, frozen rivers, the wind screaming over barbed wire far away.

Like Dachau, just like Dachau.

And then suddenly she’s there—waiting in the rain that isn’t falling anywhere except inside my skull—she’s out there by the window, cold and lonely, now inside, soaked through, hair plastered black against her pale face, standing just the other side of the glass and the years and the wire, those little bronze lager tins glinting like spent shell casings, enticing the strangest hallucination of the non-life, the camps, the smoke, the nothing, enriching this profound howling desire to cross over, to experience the other side, to lay down in that mud and snow and finally, finally be still.

I reach for another tin,
another cigarette,
the rain keeps falling inside me,
and she keeps waiting,
patient as death,
beautiful as death,
while the typewriter ticks like a slow heart
and the lager fizzes like the last breath of the world.

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