beer, love, anger

3 Sonnets

I.
A devil that forces a mirror in your face,
burning titanium shackles locking you in place,
your eyelids have disappeared and you have to see
the familiar distort, in grotesque mimicry
of a beast, savage without reason. This is me
you realize, in the terminal stage of fury,
condemned portrait in the rage of Dorian Gray.
Then hatred invades, vicious strain of self-loathing
and disgust: what you have found, with torches flaming,
in the darkest retreat of soul is too ugly
to endure. How sick you feel, how small and lowly,
but the second ill does not cause the first to flee,
they weaken you together while you helplessly
watch that glass hell and yourself burning away.

II.
When I was younger, every boy I liked was perfect.
I saw one corner then one line, knew he was a square,
up in the air he went. But I never did suspect
that with me down here and he on a pedestal there,
our lines of sight could never possibly intersect.
Then of course, inevitably, the time would come where
I saw more angles that were not right, and would suspect
the inevitable: might he be a triangle?
The geometry of my affections then fall apart,
I wrench him off his mounting, he topples to the floor.
He is supine, I still standing, now I see the door
and move a step closer, but it’s no more than a start.
The wistful pedestal, the memory of four
right-angled equal lines, [can not yet leave my heart].

III.
I never used to like this frizzy froth,
bitter as a loss that stays on tongue when
swallowing is done. Taste recalls a moth
still perched, wings furled: dark, dusty, then
asleep, slowly, lightly laying self down.
But now I have come to find some pleasure
small, in this everyman’s brew, a crown
of good times with acrid tones of leisure.
The trick is tuning expectation low:
there will not be sweet, nor any fancy,
take off those heels, and barefooted go
into a keg of honest, cheap, hearty.
Wine is the candle to vodka’s fire,
beer the occasional cigarette desire.