Do you smile when
things go your way, or when things get
away from you? The repellent that
smells of alcohol you breathed in
the other night; you thought you can
drink more to get more buzz, drink more
to get miserable few hours later. You
lost that night to a dark void, a void
bottomless: where did the smile go?
Did you smile when you
woke up in the morning, woke up
unable to move, woke up with a
full bladder straining from the
alcohol you breathed in the other night?
You get up and your head explodes, soon
your bladder does too if you don’t get to
the bathroom in time: the few bottles
you drank from might do. Your brain suffers from
the dark void: the intense headache you
feel, the sourness of your throat, the
acids boiling your system until it
escapes; it doesn’t wait for
bathroom trips nor buckets; the floor
might do, if not the wall that
you meant to paint: dark yellow
might add color to the room that
you slept in the other night. You
want to go back to sleep, but your body says
fuck you, because you fucked your body and
it’s making you pay for it: more expensive than
breathing in alcohol you may have
bought, more expensive than
bottles of aspirin to relieve the
never-ending pain:
there isn’t enough aspirin pills to take
that will erase the void deep in your head.
Do you smile when you
have the urge to start over, the urge to
make the same mistake until it kills, hope that it
kills and your smile never fades? Did it occur to you that
smiles don’t leave the earth when you die, that your
body doesn’t leave the earth when you die? Do you smile to
ease the pain that never goes away? The
pain self-inflicted, like the slit of the wrist,
only cause more pain; the only way to defeat
pain is to kill pain, but you can’t kill pain without
killing yourself first.
Medication cures but adds pain; it adds a strain
to the wallet until it’s milked dry, until its
disposable like the bottles of
booze you breathed in the other night, like the
memory of your smiles because the dark void
took them, and in place of them is
more pain. You think you’re life is
being saved, perhaps so, but the moment you
lose teeth and lose hair you look like your
life is at its dusk, a dramatic decline from
six months ago when you were
unhealthy, yet undiagnosed. Look young and die young, or
look old and die old; age isn’t a number as it is
an indicator of how long you have lived through
pain, age is set by the time
your body feels too tired to move, too tired to
do what you could have done years ago. You may have
an uncle die at 52 and consider that old, yet the
next person at 80 calls him young, yet 52 is
much older than I; 52 is the age I see
most relatives die, where it was a blessing to live
past 55, where it was normal to
have diabetes or high blood pressure; the
reality of disease is accepted at ease. We
smile in our 20’s ‘cause we know we
won’t die from disease unless it’s
heart disease that kills in our sleep; a
number of years we can’t
guarantee, where people expect us to live another
sixty years, when we can only count
with our fingers the amount of people we know
living that long; they die shortly afterwards. It
makes sense they are
the ones that smiled whenever they
breathed in alcohol several nights and
their bodies said fuck them because they fucked their
bodies; they paid a price worth more than
a funeral ever could, made others pay
for the loss and for the funeral, and the
dark-yellow wall painted by a bad night, and the
bottles of aspirin that doesn’t kill
the headaches but kills the stomach; an ulcer
developing in someone in their 20’s.