“On Being a Good, God fearing Drunk”

Tyler R. Martin

I have been a fall-down fucked-up, apathetic,
Puking drunk since I was nineteen.
It has taught me much.
Being a drunk teaches one
How to vomit with grace and poise,
This occurs after years of practice.
A good drunk learns how to shift gears artfully
Driving home from his bar,
Down shifting as he corners on side streets
And narrowly misses parked cars
On the streets of suburbia.
Drunks learn quickly whose girls they can hit on,
And whose they cannot.
Being a drunk teaches you
Whose bark is worse than his bite,
And whose bites you should avoid.
Being a drunk accelerates the learning curve.
This is due to every good drunk’s contempt for all that he is not;
The booze provides this self reflection and it isn’t often pretty.
For being a drunk does not diminish or distort or provide escape from reality,
Being a drunk simply enhances it, puts reality beneath a magnifying glass to reveal the pocked, Scarred and blemished skin hiding beneath the porcelain facade.
Booze will break her drunk down so low he can only look up
And the view is nothing but decay, and this decay is toiled in by the world’s worker ants too blind to see, too innolaclated to smell the stench for the world’s trash fires.
Yes, drunks learn their lessons, and yes, drunks often swear off their medicine, tiring of reality.
But a good drunk always returns to the bottle like a devoted lover, a good drunk cannot stand his own hypocrisy..
They learn their lessons, they learn them harshly, and they learn them truly.
All this for the low low price of a 10 dollar bottle of wine.