To The Writer That Asked Me To Go To AA

Inspired by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

The coffee is just as bad as everyone
said it would be.

The chains of smoke at the door hung
like the cuffs I tied to my own
wrists,

An emaciated skeleton smiled at me
as I stood outside the door,
and bid me welcome;

I cannot imagine how I looked
to her.

Me, in all my privilege, robed
in carefree hedonism
the resolute
antagonist
of my own story.

I felt so ashamed, and tired, and
no one has ever made me feel
as lonely as the lies
I weave around
myself,

She said hey, asks if it is my
first time like I am a virgin,
and she is a mother
and a whore,
and I am a coward.

I am a coward.

I stutter as I try to answer,
as if my sports jacket,
skinny jeans and
discomfort
have not already spoken

For me.

We sit together in a circle.

I, next to her like I am waiting,
expectant for someone to
hold my hand, and
tell me everything
is going to be okay –

Waiting for someone to wake me
from dreams of justifying
substance abuse as
an escape to
trauma, like
I have been Rapunzel, and
I could climb down
my own hair,
and not fall into
a trap of my own making;

There are no white knights
at the bottom of a bottle,
two more pills does
nothing to
summon a fairy godfather,

It does not matter what
the dealer called them,
no one who looks
through
the looking glass

to find half-drowned mermaids
wants anything other than
gratitude; it does not
matter to them
if they are fishers and

You are drowning in the nets
that trail in society’s wake,
there are no stories
you write about
being okay at AA, and

No one held my hand. No one
lied, and told me that
someone was
coming to
pick me up, or take me home

Like it was 5am and I was in
a club begging for it to be
Connections, and
trying to find it
bent over a toilet, no.

One of the first things they tell you
is to never trust another addict,
you are all in purgatory
together.
Imagine all the people

Living in a well, and there
is only one ladder out
and maybe
you can all climb out,
but it doesn’t look too sturdy;

It looks like it may break, and
in our circle I look at
fractured eyes,
broken souls,
and everyone can heal,

but sometimes you have to choose to.
No one tells you it’s going to be
okay when you go to AA.
It isn’t.
That’s why people go to AA.

There is nothing like the devotion of
an addict asking you to stay clean
to ask you to be better
than you are, or
want to be.

I pass when I am asked to tell
a story. It is one of the first
times my narcissism
has ever
refused a stage.

When I refuse, I am asked why
I am there. I think I am
meant to talk about
my rock bottom,
but instead I say that

I am tired of looking at myself
and pretending I am poison
instead of injecting it
snorting it
instead

Of pretending I am a train, and
railing it like it is hope
and I am looking
for something
to guide my path

Instead of choosing it for myself,
instead of pretending I am
just another conscious
conscienceless
appliance, and I have not

Poured extra charge into my
morning coffee, or
my morning
routine
before I plugged in

To news websites devoted to
hopelessness, and attrition
like I have not driven
to work and lied
when I am asked how I am,

Like I have not honestly said
“oh, you know, the usual.”
and continued to
propagate
initiate

To indoctrinate the people
around me when I am asked how
my weekend was, and I say
“oh, you know
I had a few too many.”

“Classic.”

Like I have not perpetuated the cycle
like I have not taken people
under my wing, and
given them
booze when they said

They had nothing.

Like I have not found ways to still
take that from them.

I am tired of pretending that I am
Gatsby perpetually chasing
an unattainable hope,

Like I am not Gatsby escaping down
a bottomless well filled with
liquid, and no air

Like I am not Gatsby, and I am going
to be different when I choke
on my own aspiration;

Like I am not Fitzgerald pretending
that what I saw in the war
didn’t define who I am.

I have spent years writing poems about
how my trauma didn’t define me,
then put my picture to it

In every dictionary, in every chapbook,
in my fucking TED talks about how
I choose to be like this,

Like I didn’t look the other way
when I dived into the pool,
like I didn’t put

Bullet holes through my own
magnanimity before I asked others to
go skinny dipping with me;

Someone in the circle asks, rhetorically
whether people can really change.
Really.

I believe they are referring to a mother,
or a lover, or maybe someone
as toxic as I am,

Or as toxic as the poison my car pumps
into the air as I lie to myself about
the impacts I have;

Suddenly I am fourteen again. I am
talking to a counsellor about
whether being

A victim of abuse turns you into an abuser.
It does not. I was afraid that my only
two options were that

Of victim and victimized, and no one
had ever modelled anything
different for me.

My guidance counsellor told me no.

Our leader tells us no.
A ripple of shame

echoes around the circle like
they are bats, and we are walls, and
they are finding a way

to feel good about themselves.
Maybe they are. It is easy
to pick apart AA

If you try.
It is easier than making changes,
easier than going home,

And pouring bottles of expensive hate
down sinkholes. It is easier than
falling asleep next to

your trauma. It is easier than facing
whatever you started running
away from –

Eventually, the session ends and I wrap
my shaking hands around a
polystyrene cup

Filled with mud and muck and caffeine,
and someone asks if I’ll
come back next week.

For a moment, I am Gatsby again and
I am so disillusioned by society
that I can be read as

A rebel, and not just a romanticisation
of consumerism; like I am not
just a poster boy

For pretending I can make it if I try,
like I wasn’t handed everything
at a private school,

And even if I were one part Jewish,
another part Irish and write
about suffering,

That I have not chosen to stare into
the darkness and pick to see
a glimmer of green

As hope; and not just the dust
behind my eyes given life
because I choose

To write poetry about apocalypses
that are easier to imagine than
whatever filth I choose

To pour into my life, or poetry scene.
Like I can stare at green light
and ignore

What I perpetuate with Spoken Word in Perth,
like I can ignore rape culture when it is
a sad boy, or a sad girls

collective. Like lies like that don’t come out
in the laundry, man. I am so tired
of waiting

For something else to change, and
I tell this smiling skull that
I have come to AA

Because I am tired of being told who
I am meant to be;
I am tired

Of waking up the next day feeling sick,
or anxious because of the poison
I put into my veins

To forget the whispers of
cliques and clacks that I hear in the night,
when I read malice into

Viral posts about no good trash me
collecting case studies about
other people’s trauma

In study groups, or therapy groups,
or slam performances like
there aren’t coded

discussions about the good, the bad
and the cancelled on their way
to opera houses,

like sometimes there are burning eyes
that need to not see storytellers
on stages with sick men.

I am tired of telling stories about
being sick.

I am tired of being sick.

I am tired of telling stories when
it changes nothing.

I am tired of being a cog in a machine
that coughs and splutters, and
goes on.

I am tired of generational trauma, of
sons that mimic their fathers
when they play

explosions in their backyard.
I am tired of breaking apart
and destroying

so much that I can be blamed
for the dysfunction
of others.

I say yes. I will be back next week.

I am tired of telling stories.

It is time to live one.