I'm drunk
I'm very drunk
Not on beer or *****
Or wine or margaritas
But I'm drunk
But on what Nero?
What'd you get sloshed on?
I'll tell you
I'm drunk of a mixture of bitterness and lost hope
2/5ths of romanticism and no one to share that with
A shot of insecurity, and a tall glass of stress

I need to get sober
I'm tired of living through a constant hangover
So tomorrow I stop drinking my emotions
I'm throwing that bottle into the ocean

It was a complete mess.
Loads and loads of things,
From soiled hosiery to paper cups
From books to each piece of clothing I ever had
Were thrown everywhere around in the room.
The whole place looked robbed.

Cleaning the room and keeping things in order
Was never my responsibility.
It was hers.
She would nag about it all the time.
She would ask
What I’d do without her.
This was the one question I never wanted to know the answer.

May be that was why,
I was reluctant to clean the place.
Deep down, I believed,
If I waited long enough,
She would figure I could not manage without her
And she would come back
And clean up the mess.

But weeks had gone,
I still had no clue about her whereabouts.
Why would she do that to me?
I was the love of her life.

“Enough is enough.
I am going to clean this mess.
I don’t need her.”
Enraged, I decided to start with books.

Books were the second best thing in my life.
They’d keep my company always.
Then I saw the book, which she bought me
When we moved to the countryside.

As I picked that book,
A small turquoise-y peacock feather fell.
The falling feather brought to me
A series of memories-
A mix of sad and happy moments with her.

After we moved here, we went to a park
In hope, it would cheer me up.
And it did cheer me up.
We played, we laughed.

At a distance, there was a peacock,
Boasting its colourful feathers.
I’d never seen a peacock before.
Amazed, I found a feather it had left behind.
Which I insisted to keep.
She placed it in the book
We just bought.

I still tremble sometimes,
When sights of my drunkard father beating her cross my mind.
He would abuse her and do sick things to her,
Still she would say he was my father
And I ought to respect him.
How could I?

And one time, he beat me.
He beat me with a belt
Because she bought a ‘stupid’ book for me
Instead of a bottle of bear.
That was the last time
I’d seen him.
She decided we would move away
Without any second thoughts.

“You’re meant for great things.”
She would always say.
She did odd jobs,
Tailoring, waitressing, private tutoring,
So that we could manage my school bills, rent
And square meals a day,
Probably ignoring health and physical wellness.

She sacrificed everything for me.
When she’d me, she left her job to look after me.
After we moved here,
Things were supposedly normal.
But she was going great troubles
To make ends meet,
With a smile on her face, she kept going.

At that instant, I knew she would never leave me.
She was still watching me,
Probably telling the stars
About her 'childish' son.
“I will make you proud.”
I promised to my Mom, my hero.

…  And I am still trying.

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.