"The Drunkard" - A Poem

All across the night he stole,
softly and swiftly,
delicate as a doe,
his hands chained at the wrists.

He tried to hold a stranger, a bum,
a neighbor and an old lover.
But he frightened them with the red in his eyes
and instead he swam with the smoke in the sky,

Pluming into the darkness,
as if it lit up the stars themselves
from a great distance,
shrouding into infinity all that is abstract.

The bricks in the walls became his friends,
he rubbed the red stone with his fingers.
God, he could taste the mortar and dust!
It whispered to him and shattered the illusion of detachment.

And in that deep umbra of blackness,
the perfume of his soul—so fragile now—
lilted in the air somewhere between his mind
and the moon’s.