Keeping Myself in Check

The sunlight leaves sheet music against my closed eyelids
and songs trickle through and waltz out of me.

Life is illuminated.

The stars are thin tin cut into appropriate shapes.
But that’s all they have to be to spark some poetry.

The sober, sane, off-kilter, sarcastic alike
rearrange alcoholic chess pieces in patterns
that bubble and slink across the host’s crowded floor.
It’s a game so big and familiar, everyone knows it’s nothing.

We drink to our freedom.
Gulping, we reassure ourselves that our volubility is on our own terms.
And life is aluminium.
It connects, it conducts, it comes in a 6-pack.

My heart does cartwheels I put an end to.
Pausing the loop, I set down the can.
I find the imprints of song in my fingerprints
and life hums warm, illuminated again.