The Drink

Douglas W. Gray has conjured up these gloves-off snapshots of alcohol abuse. He opens with a prologue for the damage done, tormented by addiction; the poems are stark and sometimes brutal, moving through a sequence of random days. The closing section concerns rehabilitation: from admission to effect, from meditation to those who populate this claustrophobic atmosphere, every conscience guilty; within the soul the ever-present threat of relapse.

Prometheus

I don’t bear my cross like a cripple,
but I’m this social stink— you can’t tell me
from Adam, shackled to the drink.

Draughts waft from city bars, I’m choking for one
last hurrah, but let’s be fucking honest,
do you enter a brothel to kiss?

And what a drag, this plastic bag, that doesn’t
glug or clank— I drank gods of fire,
from aftershave to methylated spirits.

Unshaven Aberdeen in hungover noon,
stop signs, yellow lines my liver;
sick at the need of a hit.

Bio: Douglas W. Gray lives in Cove Bay, Aberdeen. Published widely in magazines, he is a founder member of the Dead Good Poets and former editor of poetry magazines Storm and Spume. Collection: Flesh, Place and Other Colours published April 2006.