Freedom Of Depression Poem by Ash Hickok

I’m riding a bottle of Jim Beam like a time machine,
blurry vision is a fallacy
because I’m clearly seeing everything I’ve ever seen.
A buzz of clairvoyance, a stupor of enlightenment, layers of hypocrisy
easily make sure that I don’t see-
myself.
There were times it took all of my attention and energy
just to pretend that I was sober.
I’m drinking- a toast unto my health.
I remember...
Oh, how I remember every blackout reverie
and every roller coaster thought drunken happy and sad,
I remember beautiful glossy eyes calling to me, I remember the taste of ‘her, ’
a blur of voluptuous breasts, intoxicated real emotion and how true lies were.
I was sure I found the one with more than one attractive, sweaty lover.
I remember the good times and I remember my methods for trying to forget the bad.
Those cries for help became silence not long after her suicidal pleas.
I heard a burning bush say that I had to “drink life as it comes, straight no chaser.”
Tree-time, the nutrition of necessities, watching the clock of the trees,
I remember exactly when sin became my treasured attrition.
I remember life, a broken day, and posing; pretending like I was MacGyver,
making something from random nothings as I fixed what I decided was broken,
trying to put a fallen world back together with an empty coke bottle, a rubber band..
and a paperclip-
but I only ended up making a bong.
I remember elusive behavior, momentous moments and closed lies by the man of the sand,
then spending all night I should have been sleeping repeating that same song.
I can recall my very first sip
with such clarity that it must have been yesterday.
Oh, but it was just yesterday that there turned out to be no more days,
now it would take a lifetime to try to dissect that breathing haze
and a life to understand why there is an order of operation-
how you always have to hit walls to finally finish and why your stories are summarized by the phrase
“crash and burn.”
Fear with all of your being while being only fear,
pray to the end, to your living god, to your dead dog, I don’t care
as long as you stop crying and quit pointing at that mirror.
I’m looking into my own teary eyes, telling myself it’s okay
convincing my best drunken attempts at justification that I’m only drunk and it’s only fair.

Pinching my imagination to see if I’m still dreaming, feeling the weight of weary lungs.

A teary heart, I am the redeemer,

a soft-spoken soothsayer, I wrote no book but misfortune is the New York Time’s best seller,
I am still Lady Luck’s worse betrayer for the 20th year and 40th week; I am the softly sung.

Smoked myself stupid before I saw the face I live with.
If I had reacted different,
if I had been more of a conformist, if I had believed, if I had been better… What If?
Walking that crooked line, you mistook me for a crook just because my intentions were hell-bent,
I shined a silver grin, to your face I acted like the good boy,
but I already knew happiness was a myth.
My playground found degradation
but I still had my favorite toy,
so I smiled with a frown and worked my way down a personality
evolving around a revolving one-manned revolution of adaptation,
just hoping that the judge didn’t see
-another revolution of the mind / just another random rotation-

“Do you think the world will be inherited by the meek?
No one else will pay for your repentance.'
I hear you, I’m all fears, tell me if there is war on all sides how do you turn the other cheek,
turn your back on violence
or turn into anything but a warrior,
while surviving.
I’m not just saying this because the words sound like they make sense...
I know and I’m sure.
Definitively questioning striving,
driving for the end
of the race like any good driver attempting winning.
Having no clue how it will end; a story teller making it up as I go, but I have a story to tell.
“Holy unholy rusted metal Batman, ” praying for those bars to bend,
watching corny television on jail cell cable.
The checkered flag just grinned, I saw it while looking for a godsend
-begging for the future.
A lover fighting for a fresh chance at repentance, while wondering what I‘m doing it for
as I fast
remember every remnant of my past,
I remember the tingle tongue taste of cigarettes laced in cocaine,
a number numb than Novocain,
how true the best lies will seem
while falling from grace, almost losing, retrieving snorting drips, believing the smile on a numb face.
Some goals became the falling dream of a downtrodden self esteem
while the others are only “what could have been.”
There are traces in my mind and personality designated for me to see as a lost space it is time to misplace.

The rising son, downtrodden, forgotten,
writing whatever is on my mind using my freedom of depression,
Fearing I've forgotten who's steering, stuck studying Zen.
Truly for the first time... Again.


-aSh