“Man, I been thirsty” pretty much
sums it all up. In the hospital to dry out, but using go-out privilege to tie
on one, and pretty much unapologetic about it. Man, I been thirsty. This from a
guy who went on two-day drunks, where he would wake up in the hospital with no
memory of where had had been for two days. The white costumes not there to
help, to provide for life and healing, blah blah blah, they merely “threaten
his rum.” I guess as perfect a statement regarding substance abuse as you’re
likely to find. This poem doesn’t hide, doesn’t lie, and doesn’t concern itself
with what anybody thinks. Putting it out there frank and straight is its point,
and if an unaddicted reader shakes his head and doesn’t get it, that just means
the reader has some growing to do. Figure it out. The need for a drink, for a
fix, swells in the addict’s consciousness until it blots out everything else—love
& family, law, dignity. I don’t get it myself. So what? What do I know? I might
at least try acknowledging what I’m told by people who don’t shirk from what’s
what.
There is still work to do. Alcoholic
as B. was, he was as much poet and literary figure as alcoholic. He took that
seriously as well. But what must a troop of Boy Scouts look like to somebody
who knows he has passage booked on a train expressing him to a bad place, which
won’t stop, and he couldn’t make himself get off anyway? It probably triggers a
mixture of things: envy of innocence and of the physical strength and health of
youth, a bit taken aback by the earnestness of the canteens and backpacks and
the uniforms, maybe a guilty contempt for their dopey ignorance, with shame hot
on the heels of that. They’re kids. The poem plays on the contrast between B.’s
hard-edged existence and the near-alien world that features a hiking troop of do-good
Boy Scouts. But maybe the job of the Scouts is to breeze a freshet of something
wholesome through his befuddled brain on a Saturday morning, long enough to
take care of the business of literary production, before thirst forces its way
back and demands a drink. This feeds the art, though the unholy coupling of
writing and drinking will more than likely lead to eventual disaster. Those
trains often crash.
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