A Chit From Rehab

A funny place filled with smiling, paranoid faces. Every so often a nurse or waitress calls by with food but beneath the sugary greetings there is nothing. The round window in the door reminds you of a hatch in a prison cell, its glass freezing with every touch.

'I know that tea
will be the death of me
in this slab that keeps my mouth from alcohol.'

It is a confused place, this stately house which would never invite my crazy lover - the ginger lady. Sorrow walks on its clean, plush carpets, dragging its tail of misery to every level of despair. The desperate crew of '96 are here within the clutches of sobriety and on the doorstop of intoxication.
Everyone behind the diamond veil of the building has a tragic story etched into their swollen hearts.


'What sweet tears weep from inside!
Cravings rattle the bed
like a snake jigsaw,
doomed to shy away from glass lips.'

Each word spoken is filled with thorns to rip our strangled emotions from sore souls. It takes a mighty tattooed Jesus to carry this cross and my shoulders are much too tired for words.
The occasional sunbeam filters in, usually in the shape of pretty, tinsel coloured tablets which bind the mind and burned nerves to bliss. But these are mere splinters to an otherwise lead weighted shadow, and ultimately little comfort for comfort is a lost word in rehab.

'Quiet whispers to the sober moon
send buzzing stars into a jealous frenzy!
The beautiful cake eaten
candles blown like dry ribs.'

When I leave this holy hangover-free castle of wreckages, I want to remember this sparse time to feed the memories to the beast of beasts which will surely come hunting, looking for the door to my soul.
It is a tombstone life in here, the glowing life vein outside severed and we are constantly subjected to alcohol's spite.

'Over rivers of bourbon
where once we put our livers to sea,
we sail to a land of drought.
All madness here is drowned,
starved on sober air.
Are we finally free from insanity?'

This gothic house which has been a jail of mixed sensations for a month, now shrinks in the distance as I disappear into an unknown forest of oblivion. All the chants and mantras in the world cannot damp the toxic fires for the flames are fed with human spirit, the immortal foe.

Steven Francis, April 1996