poem of the day 02.08.10

impaired

i wonder if i’m not drinking enough lately

if drinking would even help

but these mornings
so impaired

unable

for better or worse, i don’t know
what mornings like this feel like

i think i must feel like most people now
waking up and thinking about coffee and traffic
about bosses and cutbacks

i used to wake up feeling like henry miller

but that was last week

it’s not just in front of the machine
trying to pound out words
that i feel this way

impaired

it’s taking the bus, too
looking at the dead faces in their blue plastic seats
going to church or the grocery store
looking at seas of rotting flesh on the job
in the pages of the impotent books
that i’m reading

where are you when literature offers no solace?

i might as well turn on the tv now
and call it a life.

i stop for coffee
and it tastes watered down too.

i stand in the kitchen
i tell my wife that the world is a drag lately
an abomination of trivialities
as cold air comes in through our cheap windows

winter feels like it’ll never end.

just like the numbness in my soul

outside the sky is black and still
it is my kind of sky, usually

but it has a limpness to it today
i can’t describe it

it lingers, awaiting a stillborn morning

hard to think that last night
i sat on the couch, with you, talking about
paris and love

paris and love seem like a lifetime ago
after a night of sleep and bad dreams

i taste the coffee
it is growing cold now

the radio offers me nothing but bad opera
and the cats offer me nothing but inherent lethargy

like most days, i think
some mornings never end

especially the ones where you’re trying
to make genius out of a lump of shit

out of the shards of intellect and the past

mornings like this can go on forever
like conversations over sports games
like conversations about paris and love

like waiting to become something again

when the deck is stacked against you
and you have to get in the morning shower soon
or else you’ll be late for work.