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I walked about 4 miles home while nursing a bottle of vodka.

I've seen these houses, these businesses, every day for years
but now they glow with that pre-dawn illuminance offered by
speeding drunks and cops and kids on pcp screaming down alleys
when I'm the only one who can hear.

I don't remember it raining during the night
but the puddles huddling against the curbs seem to remind me of something.
Something lost and stagnant like the abandoned bastard water that exists
without the rain to blame it on.

I left the party and the friends when I realized that I hated everybody there
and I took the rest of the hard liquor with me.
It doesn't cure the loneliness but it makes the cars sound pretty on the freeway,
that undertow of loud and dizzying hums matching red and white lights
and the occasional blue sirens that ease beneath the overpass I almost fell from.

I watched the headlight streamers stare me down until they disappeared
beneath the concrete balcony on which I swayed.
Like swimming in murky lakes with the smell of burning rubber and gasoline
I thought fondly of falling, sinking,
floating suspended in whatever euphoric misery in which I was dreaming.

Gravity decided to pull me home instead.