The Alcoholic

You were an alcoholic, my mother says, Fixing me with her timid tear-watered gaze – You lived in paradise, on the wings of angels, And you were an alcoholic… So we had to take you away Like Eve with her apple we had to remove you, From the temptation – from your final graceless fall We did it to save your life She says it, tremulously, and I make no rebuke, Offer no sharp retort But she knows, and I know, that tearing me from Paradise did no good That I am still an alcoholic; always will be For though the booze was cheap in Paradise, the thirst is in my soul And wherever I am, it comes along too A dehydrated demon, crouched in my belly, A baby screaming for milk – laced with your finest vodka I crave the drink, I cherish the drink…I hoard it like Gollum with his precious ring And whenever I can, wherever I am, I thirst and I swallow And I fly into the air on tenuous wings, Unshackled from sobriety for a brief tempestuous time But the hills skimming below me are bleak, There are no angels with me, and my heart is a cold lump of lead I am consumed by bitterness For though the alcohol remains, the landscape is not the same And all is now black where it used to be shades of grey And oh God, how the memories haunt me now, Memories of when I used to live in Paradise, and drink… How I soared above those Utopian beaches of golden sand, Over those glossy jungle-garmented hills They were my salvation, my succor during my drunken despair But I was cruelly torn away from my precious Eden not so long ago, And sent to purgatory to repent, still nursing the thirst, deep inside And now here I sit, on the banks of the Styx, still thirsty – still drinking Still an alcoholic, swallowing acrid mouthfuls of angst and self pity But there is no Paradise now to comfort me, no angels with gossamer wings No one to wipe the whisky tears that stream down my ashen cheeks I am an alcoholic still, with nothing left to live for and nowhere left to go So when my mother says she wanted to save my life – to save me from myself I look at her in sullen silence and wonder; How the loss of Eden could ever have taken away my alcoholic shades When the mutinous eyes that stare through them belong, solely, to me?