I wake in sweat long before the dawn
I have not showered in days now
living on cigarettes and booze and coffee and weed
and the toll it takes in some strange
rite of passage
aging decades in months and showing
time passing in rushes and spurts
where once youth shone and held to
features of open smile, now lines form
eyes sunk to hollows in snow-shot ground
I probably smell terrible, but fuck it
nobody will notice or care
there’s an irony to it as I once
was so careful of my look and my ablutions
disaster is another way of knowing
that I cannot take charge of this bodily machine
so I drink and I smoke and ignore
those other needs
the seeming irrelevancies of time and tide
they no longer have use nor meaning
I try — I want!
to write poetry of love and of beauty surrounding
but those images are not mine to give or to say
and with each effort comes the hidden hollows
of my cheeks now covered in my beard
I wish sleep, but it comes so infrequent
troubled with dream and wakefulness
in the lonely hours of the winter night
Addled
