By Anna Bennett
(Poem by Vidal Alcolea)
Here is a second poem from the blog: Poetry on Dialysis. It just has four entries all published in April 2008. Vidal Alcolea is a playwright, poet and artist. His book is available here.
I Will Drink No More Forever
By Vidal Alcolea
The days of wine are gone for sure.
Roses there never were any.
The million or so cigarettes with which I drew
the symbols of my life on earth in the air
are a horrid memory which causes me
feelings of regret and culpability.
What I am sucking into my system now
through tubes stuck in my veins
are serum and heparin,
a substance they inject into you when you are on dialysis.
I forget what it is for, exactly...
Once there used to be many people
sitting around the cafe table drinking and smoking
and talking all kinds of nonsense.
It was good.
It was beautiful.
A lot of those characters were eccentric,
perhaps crazy.
They all were unforgettable.
Some are still alive.
A lot have died.
Time has changed. Everything has become something else.
There is no one by my hospital bed pouring wine into a glass,
or lighting a cigarette.
Those things are surely responsible,
at least partly,
for my being here now,
dependent on a machine to cleanse my blood and go on living.
Yeah, they were terrible things to do,
smoking and drinking so much.
But it was beautiful.
And I smoked and drank for many years,
while I pondered about
the beauty of people and the strangeness of the seasons,
and fell in love
and painted paintings I thought were great.
All before friends began to die
one after another and
death planted itself in my mind
like a great black tree in a garden full of snow.
And now I am going through my own struggle with disease and
my own mortality is before me at all times.
But I think back to those days
and see that they were innocent.
I can tell you I long to go back to those places,
wherever they are in the time that has vanished,
and find those people who no longer inhabit the present,
sit at the table, and drink without care,
until I feel like breaking into a wild song,
and worry about absolutely nothing.
reformatted from the original source Poetry on Dialysis
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