Poem - Raise a Drink

Inspiration is a funny thing. The poem “Raise a Drink” was inspired first by a pictorial meme. The author published a series of photos his perfect girlfriend. He ended it with the acknowledgement that she was now an ex, and he did not realize what he had during the relationship. This got me thinking about a life situation in which my best friend is also a near stranger. I tried to express this dichotomy, but I ended up writing a poem about a person who was drowning their sorrows because of a lost love, perhaps lost because of a wrong the drinker performed. This isn’t what I do, but that’s where the poem went.


Raise a Drink

Here's to one I do not know,
long companion cast away,
gone forever from my world.
Even now I'd hold them close,
cry to heaven with shut doors
if my memories were more than smoke.

Raise a drink to the mystery,
acknowledge my sins are many,
why life unwinds in ways oblique.
The eyes are closed, heart is broke,
life unseen as tears collide
in my glass more clear than life.

Beverage will cloud my thoughts,
welcomed thief of my sight,
impure savior of dubious plots.
Devil's brew makes past obscure,
present mired in deep gloom
while future departs from my view.

Salute the dark corridors,
paths I'll walk when I rise
from this seat of suffering.
Melancholy will have its way,
in time I'm damned to replay
when the bottles lose their sway.

A last toast to time's deceit,
damn not the ghost I expose,
the wrong was mine to commit.
To say otherwise is conceit
the cursed change I rail against
was mine to stop or to commit.

© 2016, Sean Green. All Rights Reserved, 20160129.