An Epithet for All That

David Wolsky 

I.

Staggering through Whole Foods flush with food stamps
in a grimy winter daylight & a stolen business suit
away from hours of group therapy in submarine anterooms
of the Rehab Clinic where the homeless by day
& the Wall Street rich by night discuss why they submerge
themselves in wine or smoke the crack rock or leak vein
until the sparks fly out their eyes or they lose life, savings,
or their food stamps; meet me there, in Union Square,
for we humans are habitual creatures, I return
to summer shoved by elbows, am struck feelingless

By how small the distance is when it hangs between oblivion
& where I stand a passenger
shoved down under a tremendous weight
of drugs called meds & said to make my mind behave,
a man who claws your eyes with every gambit,
& asks you out to lunch 1 shoelace short of suicide in a raincloud
Tuesday subway morning rush hour,
a lurching all the way
to group out patience therapy, where there’s a form for promises
to Do No Harm to self; a form for finding out
if what the urine tells the judge will keep you free;
A line for train fare on the city’s time;
A line of clones shuffling on Klonopin;
A line from one man: “Hey!
You! Can you piss in this cup for me?” I do. That’s how
much I care about people, keeping

a Mon.—Sun. day schedule
of Shakespearean rehab tragedies,
municipal talk therapy, missed fortune, [sic]—
Crushed tablets, powders
smoked & insufflated, injected, swallowed,

Confessions vomited for all to witness
underwater on the fourteenth floor
the Submarine of Appetites
rises here to clouds
in blueblood’s bloodshot eyes
& bleeding bloodless hearts
of Wall Street guys, or visions quests
of men in repetitive outfits, a year
the nervous system says is wasted;
Spat out of court on Centre Street in dirty
white November,

To feel the fall’s cold lashing tongue,
a lucky break, for when the judge said,
“I don’t want to set you up for failure,
will you be able
to complete Community Service?”,
I was wearing a good suit, stolen
& thanks only to His Honor did I lose sleep
& only sleep, labored an entirety
of sleepzero workweek shoving snow from one
place to another
as sunlight winter chased
its shadows all the way into the restroom
where heroin homeless washed their feet,
steaming from their mouths and noses,
I ate thin soup, was rashed, hallucinated
& thanked God,

For this my little birdlike freedom under the
closing ceiling of a December daylight, the day
had a pale echo quality, “If only, only
you could see yourself”, you said, I saw
you sad, sad sad, & I saw nothing

II.

Now nothing has become a year.

0000000000001
; Crushing polymath delusions,
Black voicemails, & a place we come to now
When we have walked our bones
A summer over the dumbest graves of winter months
Into the mouth of June again.
D——’s mouth is filled with medicines.
D——’s stomach hungers for the seventh time
Today.
The worms infect
Poor D——’s thoughts, chew down his teeth, & D—— starts
To think of D——
Only in third person;

Moon-high, I heard you come back in
from dancing on your silver dollar sorrows,
take off your ghost like an overcoat,
ready to get married, & say
with ruined liquored breath the words
that leave me
clutching at false memories,
hoping, bursting capillaries,
screaming with the ambulance careening
into a blue delirium, cold hallways,
concrete painted with a glazed gray,

Doors fit just for jailers’ keys,
plastic pillow one inch thick and sallow pink,
thunderstorm that lashes
the world beyond the window
with raining mute and lightening just
as silent as its thunder,
these X weeks sleeping in State’s Custody
& twice a week they let you run around in
circles;

The Doctor-Warden lights a cigarette, in the
parking lot, a man the size
of a toy soldier.
Thoughts running in circles.
Futuristic sunset dripping like a grapefruit.
Watching reruns of the Special Olympics.
Thoughts like shark cannibals, circling and circling.
I lost my latitude, I went

from antidepression
to a designated: medicated
manic modified to non-
manic/ condition/ I thought about escaping/ from
NY Presbyterian
by cutting the chickenwire with nail clippers,
all the movementsensors turned red
when I lifted the styrofoam ceiling
& the zookeepers came to feed us sedatives
until I stumbled around Stalinist furniture
& Zimmerman with empty possum pupils
& a thousand page book concerning the Civil War/
who walks in silence behind me/
a hitman for the gov’t
3 months, missed diagnosis (sic), spat out

into the mouth of June again, with you

back through hilarious tunnels beneath the Lower
East Side, falling
down drunk to investment bankers’ dive bars,
Bedstuy bordertown & dungeon basement love
songs

& you imagining some real heart-beating love,
freezing in your sundress, schemes
of makeup hide your heartache.

The temperature is crashing, the worst goodbye
is over.

An emerging poet, I was born in Russia and raised in New York City, where I reside. Having previously worked as a fashion photographer, I am currently pursuing a career in public relations. My poems have been published in The American Journal of Poetry and Apricity Magazine online.