Nicole Mē | Original Poetry | Original Spoken Word Poetry

Watching Myself Learn How to Drink

I take the sip and it slides.
Past vertebra, numbers C5,
C6. Over fascia,
smooching along the undulation of
my smooth pink muscle.
It's like a lover's kiss planted
where they cannot reach.

Then it drips
with a sudden fall past heart wall.
And pools in my pit.
Arouses a small squirrel at work on its nut store.

So surprised at the ease
of the ebb,
I watch my prettied face
take another drink.
I see a lot of eyes in the mirror of mine.
How they look at me!

They start at vertebra C4, C5.
Move up and hover
and suck whatever is
soft enough to be played at by
their own gorging lips.
And then they bring their teeth into it.

So, the eyes move down for something else.
A ground not gained before or
it's new if old,
it's old if new, it's
me today
and today's prettied face.

I cropped it so they cannot land quite like the whisky
in the water of the well below where
the secrets lurk where
the told tales dwell in an untold state.
In a muted
can-you-hear-the-echoes-drum
kind of beating place.

So there, at least,
I tell myself,
I am safe and so
perhaps it's only my perception
but

The eyes bypass the pool to the grass
which has been mowed away.
(Grass isn't fashionable these days)

First an eyeball lingers on each bony hip.
Left ball on left ilium
and right ball on right - that stretched.

Because I drew up those stares,
the weighty paper glass, with will and glare.
I pulled up the gaze,
made it give me breath space
and time to sip a small sip
again as I learn how to drink.

Then the resolve ran out.
As quickly as the bottom of the bottle, just out.
I wrote a clumsy note.
Thought the sparkle of the pen
put some class on the frayed grey dirty cardboard but,
of course,

I'd learnt how to drink by then
and I kidded myself.

It doesn't work like that.

So on my note I wrote:
Open

And I left it overnight.
And felt all hours how a visitor came.
Some weak and some in power.
Some came with a grain of kindness
and most were just the garden variety.

There were ones who came in the deadest of the night
who ate me.
From the babyest hair just growing up there
to the tip of my teal-polished toenail of the longest toe.
Ate me in one go.

I would think such a monster would get sick.
But I read up on it and found out it's the substance
helps it all go in.
See, I'm learning how to drink.

When we wake, we turn over the ashes
and smudge them; watch them;
faint ... then blow quite away.
And this morning's ashes read that last night
a visitor did a flip around to my flank
and settled in the space
that I like best.
I think I now too much like drink.