My father returned late, a little unsteady,
gin pulsing from his breath,
gin sweating faintly from his pores.

After closing the door softly, he went thermonuclear
when he saw the shoes in the foyer in scattered disarray,
ripping me out of bed in a rage in the middle of the night,

ordering me in a bellowing voice to straighten the shoes right then.
“It didn’t really traumatize me that much,” I professed at the bar
while nearly halfway into my fourth gin that night.

The greats flame out in the fire of their own passions.
They burn like scintillating firecrackers against the dark.

From a distance, you feel lucky to witness such incandescence.
But the brightest brilliance burns through the feedstock of dry rot.

That Jello plate was pain, that half-bitten sandwich pain,
that drunken urinating a barely concealed cri de cœur.

We cure the meat with coarse rock salt, malt vinegar,
coriander, black pepper, garlic, paprika, and time.

We cure the meat until it’s a dried-out husk of rawhide,
until it’s inured against the winter, the rough journey ahead.

We can’t inure ourselves so easily, brine ourselves
against the bacteria and contaminants, and harshness of life.

Cardboard boxes proliferate
all across the empty room
awash with acid sunlight.

Every ending is a new
beginning, every conclusion
a fresh start, a blank slate.

All that serrated packing tape
signifies something more than back
strain and a change of address form.

I wandered out of that rock club,
ears ringing with tintinnabulation,
gnarled and deadened ears unable to hear
as I stumbled around the empty courthouse square
searching for my parked car.

That indie band was loud,
loud as hell, loud to the point
where I was deprived of one my vital senses,
at least temporarily,
but I never had a better time.

Beer list:

A hoppy India Pale Ale
A hazy New England India Pale Ale
A West Coast India Pale Ale
An English India Pale Ale
A British Extra Bitter Ale
A Belgian Framboise
A German Hefeweizen
A Chocolate Coffee Porter
Sorrow
A lot of sorrow
Too much sorrow to drown
In the fortuitous marriage of
Hops, grain, and yeast

The fourth, the fifth, the sixth hour, the seventh hour
the fireworks erupted on,
and on and on and on,
like an artillery barrage that was being walked in
on an elusive target it would never strike,
one began to wonder if one would ever be free
of the lingering smog of smoke and the sonic assault on the senses.