Happy Hour

poem

Photo by Paolo Bendandi on Unsplash

“What’s yr poison, boy?” A chubby stranger in a shabby suit is barking up the barbed-wire boundaries of my comfort zone. Tonight, this grand hall, ancient and generic, thunders with a brand of wild triumph you won’t find at weekly Bingo: men, women, black, white — indistinct, indistinguishable, rings of deified survivors thriving inside the clean and quiet cloudbanks that hover about the top landings of their sturdy 12 -step staircases.

“Poison?” There’s a vernacular? I part my lips to buy time, as if preparing a rolling red carpet of an answer. But what? Belladonna, arsenic, strychnine, digitalis, hemlock; chocolate, if I were a dog, sparkling cyanide. Too much Agatha Christie, observing like a pro the tangle of faces blurting and babbling in circles around this mammoth medieval table, protons, electrons, spinning and colliding, Marlboro stench, thermostat cranked to broiling. “If you want what we have,” says the chairman at the head of the table. It was all I needed to hear. I vanished, the unnoticed ghost, faster than a phantom, more venomous than a viper.