Day 185 – Clean

They want you to kick the bottle
and it’s painfully obvious why–
they don’t intend to feed your baby
they just want to see it live–
it’s decreed, a dozen sacred steps
will get you off the street and
feeling better, more productive
and then you can solve the rest
but you have seeds of the sickness in your blood
and there’s no medicine to take for that
every dog hair night you grasp onto
feels just like the joy they told you to find–
if the well is deep why do they care
how you fill it up? They can talk about
“clean” but all you hear is “more tolerable”,
all you see is a doctor taking your band-aids away
and collecting his check but he cannot heal
the things you see when no one’s watching
the ghosts that howl in the night, every night
if you’re clean or not.