Are We Done Yet, I Won't Talk

Here are two role plays, two very different role plays. 26 years ago, I admitted to a major leveling of my pride when I admitted to alcoholism. I agreed that the description of addiction disease agreed to by the AMA in the fifties and extended through the decades since by significant research and experience both inside the treatment community and in AA and other self help groups (as they come and go), I agreed that this body of experience defines my condition. This is one way I am basically interchangeable with perhaps 10% of the rest of the world.

The point of saying all that, whatever happens to one of us alcoholics, whether by choice or by accident, can happen to or be chosen by every other alcoholic given sufficient time in the active part of alcoholism. We talk about the yets...as in it hasn't happened to me yet, or I have not done that yet. One of my practices then is to own my imagination. If I can imagine it, in some other really possible life I could have done it.

That's what happened when I left drugs behind. My change of life hinged on the very real threat that I would be forced by my own incapacity to snitch on a friend, something that would go so far over my own moral lines that I would be left with suicide as the only alternative. So I quit dope and started drinking to survive my losses, because when I quit dope I quit life as I knew it, and admitted to deep soul failure. That is just true of where I was, leaving all the people including the woman I loved because I had to, because I did not have the strength to do otherwise.

That's what I mean. If conditions happen just so, I will crose any line that I think I can draw and hold to. I know it. So here is a poem of a failed spirit, and then a poem of a monster.

Are We Done Yet?

You left me a sign,
Impossible direction,
Merge up, so it says.

How am I going to do that?
I forgot my flying boots.

My toes are frozen,
My ears burning, don't like this.
Can't we go home now?

January 4, 2009 8:42 AM

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I Won't Talk

I don't know why they
Stare at me like that beyond
These bars. They put me
Here two days ago
Shouting something mean, awful.

They keep taking me
To this room, trying
To get me to say some shit
About what I did
Last week to this girl
But I tell them nada of
What really happened.

January 4, 2009 3:25 PM