At night the shakes disrupt my sleep.
I wake feverish, my body aching and
craving the fiery inferno of liquor
to ease the ****** tremors and the
ever present headache that
breaks apart my thoughts.
It hurts in every way.
Biting back audible distress
I curl into my empty stomach.
Hollow hunger pangs issue from within.
Alcohol withdrawal won’t let me eat.
Half asleep I clutch my ribs and wait it out
the way people caught in earthquakes do.
Eventually my mind sags from fatigue
the shudders rocking me back to sleep.

Acceptance of another requires bravery.
Not the loud, brawling courage
brought and left on the battlefield.
Rather the quiet kind of bravery when
she catches glimpses of my personal darkness
and still stays.
Her type of bravery is when
the fractured light fixtures behind my eyes flicker
before going out, plunging me in darkness.
She sits beside me sharing that dark.
She not only sees my enraged monsters
but tries to befriend them, understand them.
At times I’m deathly afraid of myself.
But she never seems to be.
And that is the greatest kind of bravery.

Something isn’t right.
Perhaps I’m a little screwy.
I thought the fear of cooties
existed only within childhood realms.
It’s come back to me in my twenties however.
In grown up terms I think it’d
be referred to as a fear of intimacy.
In psychological terms PTSD.
It snags against the chip on my shoulder
catching and consuming my heart.
I’m afraid of cooties.
Yeah, let’s say that’s the problem.
“****” is such an ugly word after all.

A deft ripple from my thumb flicked
ash to the wooden slates under my feet.
With a joint held between two numb fingers
I ruminated over the many things in life
traveled down the haunted hallways of my mind
all the while musing over the fact that
we don’t know what we don’t know.
Each thought was accompanied with
the exhalation of smoke and a dropped
bit of spent **** every now and then.
With the pain smothered
beneath a blanket of smoke
the Oregon’s early morning chill
the remembrance of past things
failed to sting as severely.
In the end a pile of gray soot lay at my feet.
Maybe I should get an ashtray
and use it to store my thoughts.