The drinking life
in pure finality
is the last dance of a vampire
immersed in mercifully dark holes
a slow eclipse
filled with the sweet air
of illuminated blue smoke
and dim red lights
strange pale faces, some fangless
and the croaking moans from rotting throats
of shriveled corpses for whom
the elixir is no longer a means
but the end
…Last Call.
For the younger undead
suckers
we awake in late afternoons
afraid to emerge before dark
into streets still too bright
for blood-filled eyes
a netherworld where passing voices
shriek offensively like a Burlington Northern in our heads
provoking primal rage in wracked bodies
still too weak to fight about it.
So we wait in fetal hibernation
until the gut holes that paint
our shit black with blood
recede
dropping like the sun
into
The Thirst.
And on the streets we stumble
emerging legion
from broken doors and
foul alleys
and Cadillac cars.
Converging at temples
a simple apartheid of dives that separates the amateurs
and the weekend frat boy bingers
from the living dead
the pros.
For we make a daily Hajj
walking the faint trail of dried bile
blazed by the old stumbling giants before us
F. Scott, Lonesome Jack, Desi, Saint Lawford
Dylan T., J. Cash, Bob Fritz, dirty old Buk
(un)Holy Jim crowned with the thorns of a Manson-like Jesus at Barney’s Beanery
and too many others to weep over
fearful one day we may suffer Von Helsing’s wooden stake of the almighty AA Dry
and be resurrected like Alice Cooper in a golf shirt.
So the rounds are poured
and our voices rise
from sick murmurs
to a reassuring drone
shaking hands become blessedly
still
and with every new glass
slit eyes open wider
mouths gape for cran & Stoli nectar
and heads jerk back
like Kennedy in that Dallas limo
exploding in sheer desire for more
and more and more and more and…
Feeding
the strength returns
the mind becomes clear again
laughter obscures our steady march
to Doom
it all makes a sick sense
destiny no longer denied
embraced.
And in our majestic moment of decline
we watch the bartender
coast by on Gene Kelly shoes
singing in our rain
smooth as a Grey Goose on Cloud Nine
in front of tiers of bottles
that glimmer in the low light
like skyscrapers of a distant city
full of shimmering possibilities
of a life no longer lived.
— Mark Cromer
“We were just a couple of drunks
on a sea of booze.
And the boat sank.”
— Jack Lemon, from the ‘Days of Wine and Roses’, 1962.
[Written from the woods of Flagstaff, Arizona, in late 2003, and a former lover of mine, a spokeswoman for a major metro District Attorney’s office back in Southern California, called to tell me “I’m so sorry to learn of the passing of Koyne.” I informed her he wasn’t actually dead. “But your poem says he is dead, it’s dedicated to his departure,” she said. “Well, it’s actually metaphorically dedicated to a path we both took,” I tried to explain. “The surreal landscape along the way, flashing by the windows, the history of it all and the end result of which, whenever it arrives, is not in question. But maybe just worth it, at least juxtaposed against the pencil-pushers that die their own deaths in a misery steeped in a sick tragedy. Is there a ‘Pencil-Pushers Anonymous?'” She paused for a moment. “And you’re ok with this? You feel this is something ok to write about? Jesus, Mark. I don’t know what to say? I worry about you. I’m praying for you. And Koyne.” I pondered everything I had done with her not all that long before, in all of her faux Born Again Christian glory, splayed as she was so brilliantly atop the sheets, so willingly lost in her own mania, lost in the revelry of our debauchery. But now she prays. “Yes,” I said. “And while I thank you for your prayers, it’s the truth. And if you ever wanted to arrive at it, perhaps your money would have been better spent at the bar instead of in the offering basket. You have your miracle water, we have ours. And ours actually works, sometimes.” Click. And I haven’t spoken with her since. And Koyne is still alive.]
