Well Bottom Blues

I wonder what sponsor counseled the guy who
wrote me the apology letter for fucking my wife.
It started I believe that night in the restaurant bar
when I couldn’t take her or another drink and
left them alone with a pitcher of margaritas.

I’m sure she must have written but I don’t remember
receiving or reading her letter. I had already forgiven
us both for our consensual drunken sins, infidelity
the least of what we’d done to each other and ourselves.
His letter ripped off that scab and I wadded it into the trash.

I never went to a meeting, even after that painful morning
I called a sober friend to meet me for lunch, and hinted
at my distress. if you think you need to go just go, he said.
I didn’t but behaved myself for a while. I hadn’t quite
hit the bottom with a coyote boulder following just yet

What saved me from myself was the good doctor I visited
to try to get off Klonopin, who recognized that my anxiety
masked bipolar disorder. ( if you want to feel maniacal
drinking daily on 2mg of Klonopin will do the trick.)
The medicine I needed came in a bottle without a tax stamp.

Sometimes I still drink too much, a third when I know
the morning consequences as I voyage into old age.
I am too much a sensualist to forego my dram of good whiskey or rum
or to give up the sweet and sour bite of Belgian ales.
But I’ve dived just deep enough in that ocean to see
the monsters that swallow the dreamy beauty of the deep.







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