I consider the cold beer in the fridge

and weigh it against the inevitable fall

of my bones, the toppling of this terror frame

whose flimsy pillars can no longer hold

the morning sun on its bloated roof.

And one beer won’t stop at two or six.

There’s years of momentum moving forward,

a sack of rocks flung toward two a.m.

when I’ll crawl in bed beside my wife

and slur confessions to small-time crimes.

There’s nothing new about a tired man,

just turned thirty-two, who sees tombstones

each time he tries to recover from a wine drunk

and finds prescription pills spilled on his tongue.

He floats through those gray days, half-awake,

in a pharmaceutical cloud because he can’t stand

the discomfort he’s brought on himself.

Maybe Rome didn’t collapse from greed

and the need to watch the world fall to its knees.

Maybe Bacchus just got old and failed to be

the god everyone once admired, as he watched

the orgies from the sidelines, a finger in his ear.

Then the Romans, seeing him in sunglasses

with dry vomit on his sandals, threw up their hands
and it all went to hell from profound disappointment.