Having once again promised his bereavement even just this single day of temperance, the while aware any accumulant sobriety will only more focus those pains manifest in his scalp and arm that thus far thus very well the use of alcohol has served dampen, still he momentarily loses faith in the cessation of routine’s ability to open for him a momentary reprieve from his hell.
The dried and scabbed blood of his scalp matted through the unkempt black hair; the incessant clamour of his ankle; the raw scars on his left forearm incurred as if defending himself from assault, which in effect he has been; the healing crease of daily converging flesh central to the bruising’s jellyfish colours and the hot persistent itch of its absent sutures: all gone unwitnessed in the midst of his ongoing grief.
It is this, or the soliciting from his Uncle Jesus an extinguishing of the self in toto, so desperate for whatever through which he knows himself to suffer to end, one way or another, as if in its sobriety his equilibrium vibrated at a frequency he found intolerable, which could be modulated only by the level of intake of Jack Daniel’s, trying and failing to settle himself back upon something bearable which in these days was passing close to insanity, routinely undone less by an active succumbing to temptation than by passive reversion to what he has come to accept as his default.
He is afforded some relief with eventual success in locating a shotglass not already emptied, only to find drowned in its remnant whiskey that last of the wasps, this summer’s lingering symbol of his mother’s madness; the glass, untouched.
The dried and scabbed blood of his scalp matted through the unkempt black hair; the incessant clamour of his ankle; the raw scars on his left forearm incurred as if defending himself from assault, which in effect he has been; the healing crease of daily converging flesh central to the bruising’s jellyfish colours and the hot persistent itch of its absent sutures: all gone unwitnessed in the midst of his ongoing grief.
It is this, or the soliciting from his Uncle Jesus an extinguishing of the self in toto, so desperate for whatever through which he knows himself to suffer to end, one way or another, as if in its sobriety his equilibrium vibrated at a frequency he found intolerable, which could be modulated only by the level of intake of Jack Daniel’s, trying and failing to settle himself back upon something bearable which in these days was passing close to insanity, routinely undone less by an active succumbing to temptation than by passive reversion to what he has come to accept as his default.
He is afforded some relief with eventual success in locating a shotglass not already emptied, only to find drowned in its remnant whiskey that last of the wasps, this summer’s lingering symbol of his mother’s madness; the glass, untouched.
