The Alcoholic Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

An hour or so, but my mind keeping looking back to a past
as trying to find the moment when things went wrong and
contentment escaped. It easy to remember simple things
like when a winter my mother couldn´t get the fire going
and through in my wooden fire truck, swearing at me for
crying. But that is not the problem, because I understood
when the room warmed and frost roses on windows thawed.
Adults can hurt children more than they understand, when
in 1945 my father came home from the sea, I was sick in bed,
tuberculosis, my father pretended he didn´t know this sickly
thing on the sofa and said who’s child is this? And ever since my
life has been blighted…. Yes I know, you will say put the past
behind you. But my sense of inadequacy was so strong I found as
an adult that the only thing that made feels equal was alcohol.
So I became drunk, if a tame one I never drink during the day
but in the evening when despair knocks on my mind I drink to still
the voice telling my I´m a fraud a working class fool thinking he is
a poet. Alcoholism is not easy it doesn´t really exist as it is
an indicator of the unresolved. I write this and it is ten in the morn
but already I´m counting the hours when I can have a drink.