And now the real test begins,
sink or swim, pass or fail.
Well, it's not an exam in
the true sense of the word;
I won't receive a grade or
a score.

This is life,
at its grittiest, goriest,
glorious best.
This is death;
crawling closer with
every wheezing, and
scrawled stroke of
the pen.

I have plenty of nay-sayers,
and my God,
I wouldn't have it
any other way.
Every good drama
or piece of fiction, or
any ******* life worth
living needs strong
antagonists, and to mine
I say this:
sometimes, you have to
walk through the fire
to get to the other side.

She wants me to
believe that her
bibulous moon calf
copulates with
her in her slumber.

She's too far
gone for me to
**** with.

The poor thing got
lost in the escape.
And she was still hungover
from the childhood terror.
Her personality was
ruined--redolent with
the first flowers of
madness.

She made a pretend
world, full of delusions.
A house of cards that
was laden with
lunacy, her insanity
became safe and dependent
on her never taking
responsibility for her
actions--she was a
pawn for the adage,
Hurt people Hurt people,
like Blanche from
A Streetcar Named Desire,
and
Don Quixote,
Her world crumbled and she climbed
into the abyss,
when she looked
deeply into the
mirror of reality.

Dawn will crackle with
madness, and a sad
soul sickness, that
breeds an all too
familiar
incomprehensible fear.

It's such hard
work to get that
click, to be okay;
to see the squirrels and
smell the leaves,
to lick the lice off the
sparrows and the grackle.

I'm back in rehab....never give up.
I just want to thank the hp community for all
the love and support...it's sunshine
in my dark night of the soul.

All my Love,
Thomas W. Case

I passed out on
some apartment
steps downtown.
Too much beer and
****** the night before.
two cops wake me,
and take me to jail.
when I got out the
next day,
they gave me my
clothes and property.
I had two ****** left,
and ate them while
changing out of the
tangerine colored jumpsuit.
I stepped into the
bright sunlight,
slipped on my ray-Bans,
nowhere to go.

I take 3 steps forward, and 1 step back .
I was sober almost 4 months.

Doing swell, the job, prolific writing.
and then, wham, A bottle of Absinthe in two hours,
Not even Van Gogh on the box or the worm wood could
make sense of the garbled words I wrote.
**** Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  And Stein can go to Hell.