Choices, Hospital Halls

Here's a piece of whimsy but it's actually not so whimsical to really really not want to be me today. I have spent whole decades sure that I needed a respite from being me on a daily basis. "Don't you know I have to drink in order to live in this world??" How dare you not know that and not understand. I wrote that quoted phrase to my wife at the start of the last two weeks of my drinking when she lowered the boom, said basically if I wanted to drink I had to go away. Or she said I could try alcohol treatment. And the thing was I knew she meant it and would not back down. That was the worst two weeks of my life, the time before I capitulated and then got sober.

I can translate that phrase now into more precise language. But this is 26 years later and I have never actually said or written this until just now, this 26th anniversary of getting sober. What I was really saying was "Don't you know I have to drink in order to live with my head??" And that my friends is the exact same statement.

Choices

Now it's a hard call,
Thinking bird, fish, man,
Which is it to be today?
I like to fly, to swim, walk.
I like them all, but walking
Means thinking. This head
Still hurts from too much thinking.
So swim or fly, which?

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Fast forward about twelve years and that's what this poem is about, what was going on about twelve years later. And then at poem's end, what happened in 2001.

Hospital Halls

The hospital halls,
Wandering, meeting nurses
No longer strangers
Now I've come here so often.
I know the way here
Like I know the way to you
And to you is why,
The only reason I would.

Cafeteria:
I know what to eat.
Only because I have to.
Back to you after.
Year after year, me,
And you gone now, it's all done.