Another Journey

two days of nothing 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 a thick blue smoke, and me pounding the keys or staring at the ceiling where the cracks look like roads I’ll never take.

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

warm sentiments, new friends from some bar that turned into angels and devils both, laughing in the kitchen light, and then the cold places — ice fields, frozen rivers, wind screaming over barbed wire far away. some camp at the edge of the world, the smoke, the wire, the nothing.

and then she’s there — waiting in the rain that isn’t falling anywhere except inside my skull — out past the window, cold and lonely, soaked through, hair plastered black against her pale face, standing the other side of the glass and the years and the wire. the little bronze tins glint like spent shell casings, and she beckons, patient, and the drink makes her beautiful, makes the mud and the snow look like rest, like stillness, like the one door left open.

that’s the lie of it. that’s what the bottle does — paints death as a woman at the window and tells you she’s waiting because she loves you.

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

I count the cannons,
in the wreck of my own skull,
no one at the glass.