Monday, October 29, 2018

Habitualism, Or When the Process of Cultural Memory Is Lubricated by Alcohol

Habitualism

Gateway gate·way noun -- a means of achieving a state or condition

They say that in the beginning
The world was formed
When the god's light expanded and burst
Dripping like honey to meet our eager mouths
Filling all of us bright and supple
Living and angry vessels
Primordial and sublime
Forming our shapes from light and shadow
We lanced through the darkness as we fell to earth
We landed and began to consume
Our fathers drank and never stopped...

Habit hab·it noun -- a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.

My father drank and never stopped
When he tried to speak only foam came out
Once I saw Aphrodite try to be born from the froth of his mouth
To divine the truth from the spittle he made
From the bubbles she coaxed I saw glimpses of his memory
Many of the bubbles were blacked out and empty
But a few shone iridescent with the clarity of the past

In the first bubble
my father's father whose face I have never seen
walking away with his back turned
his head bobbed up and down with each step
left, right
left, right
going, going
going, gone

In the second bubble
my mother laying heavily upon a hospital bed
heaving under the weight of birth
her sweat twinkling around her head like a diadem
she looked almost like a constellation
as she bridged the gap between two worlds
she holds her own hands while my father reaches
for the bottle in his heart

Tradition tra·di·tion the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way.

The only thing I inherited from my father
Was the bottle in his heart
With it I can perform my most miraculous acts
See my anxieties?
I turn them to wine
Depression: wine
Loneliness: wine
Inadequacy: wine

To perform the miracle
You must practice the ritual
It begins every time my moth-eaten knees
Prostrate themselves on the tile of the bathroom floor
They've rounded out an archive of every offering I've made
And every prayer I've presented to my cracked toilet seat

What god will spring forth from the foam of my mouth?
Will it be another love-god aiming to seduce the truth from my ravings?
Or will it be a toolmaker-god, who can forge an instrument strong enough
To break a son free from his father?

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