Get Your Premium Membership

Read Errhine Poems Online

 

When I Was Drunk and Wanted Big Words

We are all improbable in our own way, 
and who can augur the future?  
I never could have laid out my course in advance, 
though in looking back it all makes sense, 
even if it was me flipping a coin (or if somebody flipped it for me).  
Hindsight smooths the probabilistic waves, 
and here I sit, having cast the coin, 
having had the coin in pocket, 
having gotten change at an early age,
the cashier having had a drawerful of metal, 
the mint having stamped to its heart's content, 
the metallurgists having had their smiles,
the miners having ground fault wiles,
the cosmos having performed admirably, elementally. 

Here I sit, tonight's chautauqua taking place in a goblet of garnet, yea - a very phrontistery of fuchsia.  Far be it from me to understate the euphonious manner in which the cork leapt from the bottle, the Olympian olfactory embrace, the bathykolpian brand of this elixir.  The wind outside the window - what is it telling me?  Am I entangled, unawares, in my ebullience, a ptarmic influence in the decoction escaping my notice?  Am I blind to the greater reality, my words falling like amaurotic husks to the ground?  Or, that given ground, does it emit the mephitic essence?  Is this the supernatural revenge of some aspect of the wine's terroir, rendering the drinker typhlotic to the usufruct of this very forum, to an iatrogenic principle at work?  Are we held at bay by external sternutatory Influence, all our self-reliant suppositions trumped by errhine externals? 

Here I sit, wondering if 'tis no more than the contest of the Ego, Superego, and Id, grinding against one another in tribologic sculpting.  Or is a spiteful, chthonian influence at work, stemming from that same terroir?  Can the wine be blamed?  Can we cry out, apotropaically, to rescue ourselves?  Are conscious forces arrayed against us, or are we our own worst enemy?  Is there a soil/soul for a wine?  And is it only a fancy of Fortuna that I sit here tonight, deterministic tendrils floating around me in a manner that threaten my assumptions?  Am I free of myself, or is there no such thing as such freedom?  In the end, do all things come to one?  Obfuscatory clarity - yes, I know, and peace won't sleep in the transparent bottom of my glass.

Copyright © Doug Vinson




Book: Reflection on the Important Things