Analysis of Alcoholism



You can see me now a few tables away from you,
Unblinking and docile, staring yet utterly unseeing,
And I am fiddling with my hands like an anxious teenager;
You suppose—and then, so do I—
That I do rather look like an anxious teenager, all in all,
When we both let ourselves squint,
Eyes wide open and palms wide shut.
I feel a weight settling down in my stomach
Winding into my arms and turning my wrists over
And over and over into each other
Like waves crashing onto the shore or something.
I’m worried you’ll look me in the eye
And notice I’m swimming, and if you knew me,
if you weren’t just a stranger who
wandered into the same building as me,
You would know that I cannot swim
And that the last time I was at the beach
i begged my girlfriend to drown herself
before i did it for her.
I find it kind of funny
that we can walk in and out of buildings
and look at People and talk to them
and sometimes breathe on them, be breathed on,
Whatever, and we never look close and see that
all these people are swimming in something weird
and green and salty .,, this is a metaphor
for alcoholism by the way, orrr it can be a metaphor
for smoking if you prefer, or coke iguess, or gambling
its mine though, and my pool is alcoholism,
and i always knew it would be
and knowing always kept me afloat;; until it didnot.
it would be easy to stand up and leave right now\
to run home and throw myself in bed
on my mother’s beautiful handmade quilt
passed onto me in the same box as the gin and tonic
and cry and sleep until i’m not an alcoholic anymore
but at the end of the day, i still dont know how to swim
and id just be more lucid while i get
thrown around by the currents


Scheme ABCDEFGHCCBDIAIJKLCIMNOPQRRBSIFTUVBRJWX
Poetic Form
Metre 1111101100111 10101011001 01110111111010 10101111 111101111010101 11110011 11100111 110110010110 1001110101110 01001001110 11101001110 110111001 01011001111 11110101 1001011011 11111101 0101111101 11111101 0111110 1111110 1111001110 011100111 001111111 10011011011 11101100101 01010110100 110010111110100 11011011111100 1110111100 0111111 010111010111 111101110111 11101101 1110100111 11010011101010 01010111101001 11011011111111 0111110111 1011010
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 1,688
Words 345
Sentences 6
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 39
Lines Amount 39
Letters per line (avg) 33
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 1,303
Words per stanza (avg) 331

About this poem

A poem that changed as the writer got increasingly intoxicated (by which I mean, typos are intentionally unedited)

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Written on December 09, 2022

Submitted by fef on January 27, 2023

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:43 min read
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