AA Meeting (ROUND 6)
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let’s workshop this poem about the fragile nature of sobriety (where every moment feels like a precarious balancing act) and how an unexpected gesture of connection can become a powerful lifeline.
*An old poem that I have been tinkering with over the years—and today with some big changes.
AA Meeting
That hand kept fidgeting metallic ratatats too broken, too shifty in accent, to stand: knuckle staccato, pings of tinnitus tinsel like the brainstem scrabblings of squirrels in a drown barrel from my lost garden life. I scowled left—my dirty looks, grunts too, failing to pull even the corner of his vision.
For me it had been merely sober day seven. And my own hand darted out, the whacko rudiments stilled against the chair. Eyes in the circle converged on the touch. What better excuse to walk out, to mainline back to oblivion. But his hand did not let me go. It squeezed. And I spoke for the first time.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
