Spiritual Highs

I always go out for a drink with my friends wrongly thinking it will only be a quiet one and that I'll only have a couple and leave it at that. This is always my first mistake. As much as I try not to drink excessively the fact that most pubs are really boring and offer no entertainment apart from alcohol abuse drives me to it. One drink invariably leads to another and once you get on a roll its hard to stop. The Irishman in me punches his way out and I become a blood and glory poet. No one is safe when I'm in this condition. My inspired and rather sodden alcoholic freeform lyricism is a gift that I generously give to all. Pub furniture, like the tables and chairs, become props, cliff tops, crags and precipices from which I declare my creed. I become a whacked out Baptist spilling the libation and anointing every head, familiar and strange, with the god of the vine and hop. I aspire to that point of complete saturation where even the world itself is sloshing around in my glass as a liquid reality. Strangers are not safe. All their smiling enamelled faces come swooning in for a slap of vapourous wisdom. (But of course there are no strangers..we are all friends here). They know what I'm talking about. I can see everything clearly through the crystal ball of my shot glass. In a state of trance the revelations and insights flow freely through me like a spirit medium. In doubles and trebles the facts pour out of my wine stained mouth. Staggering through the galleries of drinkers like an acrobat with severe frontal lobe damage I bark and reel. My happy hour companions have a king. We launch a golden arrow at the rafters and cut the hour hand in half. With all the wrong phone numbers and different names I sail to the bar and conquer a foreign drink. As we approach closing time it becomes more and more obvious that I need to take the barman into my confidence and with secret signs and gestures I exercise the power of my will and persuasion as we begin to discuss the law. But he is a robot with a skate board and not as dangerous as his tattoos would suggest. A child in the skin of an ape. Not even Russian dancing will convince him of my magic so I ride my sorcery out through the double bolted doors into the oil slick of the midnight streets. Not even Italian Lesbians understand the currents of the after hours flood. Rivers of coal-eyed sleep walkers uttering turrette cries search for the Mecca of a late bar. Hate food is sold dripping in adrenaline to the victims of slow poisoning. And where are the covens and where are the Sabbaths? Where are the offerings to alters and bars? The sun is already chasing us home and although we swim against the drip tray tide I go to bed a god and wake up a man.