My Father's Killer

The wind blows strong and long, howls

Rain lashing down

The trees and their leaves unabashedly wet,

Dancing like teenagers high on hash

The long, ceaseless road empty

Some streetlights on duty, others holidaying or dead

God’s people love the rain

I don’t

It’s not beautiful and it doesn’t bring me any peace

But I do feel a strange stillness as the heavens open up

As if all our rushed days play out at half their usual speeds

The madness relents, life is lived

The hands of the clock are broken

I don’t love the rain but I am grateful to it, for it.

I’m at Z’s place.

Z is a person and they could be anyone.

Y or Z or K or godforsaken F opens a bottle of rum

Everyone helps themselves and I am offered a glass.

There is a sudden, horrible change in mood.

A loud screeching sound tears apart the insides of my ears

The madness returns

The clock hands work overtime and at a breakneck speed

“Oh! dear Lord, why are you doing this?

Have some mercy.

Have some mercyyyyyyyyyy” I cry

But I’m not one of God’s people

So there is no mercy.

Rum takes me back to Dad and to alcoholism and ill-health and bad p

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arenting and failed marriages and hospitals and death and the stop-start way the fire burnt when Dad was cremated

Day becomes night, rain becomes a flood or a cyclone,

Madness becomes insanity

Poetry becomes failed therapy

One half of the city burns, the other half flooded

Women become men and men all become monsters and children they don’t matter because they are too busy living to get fucked

Music becomes the sound of sex between garbage cans

Dance becomes involuntary convulsions

Whatever little love is left becomes hate and hate increases the intensity of it’s hatred

Marx fucks capitalism in the ass and kills both in the process

There is no world order, good or bad

There is no one and nothing

Just rum

Just father-fucking rum.

I obviously refuse to drink.

And through this shitstorm I see myself talking to a mirror that obviously doesn’t reflect anything

Alcohol consumed my father as much he consumed it

And it is consuming me as much as I don’t consume it.

He loved a drink and it killed him.

I hate a drink and it’s killing me.

But this fight against alcohol I will continue

Because in my own sick, twisted, deranged way

I am a victor.