Limbo: Altered States

No sooner does the plane angle up

than I cork off to dream a bomb blast:

A fireball roiling through the cabin in slo-mo,

seat blown loose from its bolts,

I hang weightless a nanosecond

in blue space

then jerk awake to ordered rows.

And there’s the silver liquor cart jangling

its thousand bells, the perfect doses

of juniper gin and oak-flavored scotch

held by a rose-nailed hand.

I don’t miss drinking, don’t miss

driving into shit with more molecular density

than myself, nor the Mission Impossible

reruns I sat before, nor the dead

space inside only alcohol could fill and then

not even. But I miss

the aftermath, the pure simplicity:

mouth parched, head hissing static.

How little I asked of myself then—to suck

the next breath, suffer the next heave, live

till cocktail hour when I could mix

the next sickness.

I locked the bathroom door, sat

on the closed commode, shirtless,

in filmy underpants telling myself that death

could fit my grasp and be staved off

while in the smeary shaving glass,

I practiced the stillness of a soul

awaiting birth.

For the real that swarmed beyond the door

I was pure scorn, dead center of my stone and starless

universe, orbited by no one. Novitiate obliterate, Saint

Absence, Duchess of Naught . . .

A stinging ether folded me in mist.

Sometimes landing the head's pressure’s enormous.

When my plane tilts down, houses grow large, streets

lose their clear geometry. The leafy earth soon fills my portal,

and in the gray graveyard of cars, a stick figure

becomes my son in royal blue cap flapping his arms

as if to rise. Thank god for our place

in this forest of forms, for the gravitas

that draws me back to him, and for how lightly

lightly I touch down.

Source: Viper Rum (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1998)