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