DAVE LORDAN

Alcohol

One morning in the springtime of 1985 the people of the neighborhood of Bog decided, all at once, to cease drinking alcohol

and began chanting together for freedom instead,

chanting of freedom and love and togetherness in undulating unison,

chanting like early christians at mass in the wilderness,

like early christians calling down the assumption.

*

Midday came and went

for the first time in decades

without one drop of drink in the neighbourhood

as the people of Bog were chanting along

with ever greater harmony,

with ever greater melody,

with ever greater enthusiasm,

and even as they chanted

the men took turns to hug each other,

hug each other long and hard

and tearfully,

crying tears of release

tears of return

tears of purification.

*

The chanting and hugging also helped

the men and women ignore and ride over the seizures and shakes

and the Hamlin of rats that had poured

from the alcohol sewers inside them

in the throes of delirium tremens, which passed.

*

Then each one of the clarified men

lay down on their bellies like serpents

in prostrate penitence

before the women and children they

had treated as punchbags and slaves for so many years

and there was so much more weeping

weeping of joy and acceptance,

rivers of rage and forgiveness

as the chanting went on

higher and higher and still more absorbing and sonorous.

*

Night fell. The neighbourhood of Bog was assaulted by the enraged allies of alcohol

at both of it’s exits.

The exit leading to the town which Bog was semi-attached to

was attacked by publicans and priests bearing stakes and clubs and maces and knives.

The exit leading to the west and the coast and to Washington and disappearance

was attacked, with the usual vigour, by police with batons and gas alongside schoolteachers with belts and canes and long

bamboos full of splinters,

but none of these had reckoned on mongrels

on the vicious stray dogs of the neighbourhood of Bog who

had also stopped drinking

stopped drinking and sniffing and wanting to die,

wanting to die but being too broken too cowardly too toxic dependent

to actually kill themselves.

No, the assailants had not reckoned on dogs,

who, by stopping drinking, had become more like what wolves

might have been had man not existed

or superior aliens with street-fighting genius

and while the people of the blighted neighbourhood of Bog

continued in beautiful unison

with their now approximately Byzantine chanting

these dogs tore all their assailants to strips

and devoured them down to the marrow and bowels.

For the very first time the neighbourhood of Bog

belonged to the creatures who lived there.

*

But only till news got up to the capital,

where the distillers and brewers in charge of the land

met right away to plot the destruction of Bog.

They sent all  their battalions with Poitín grenades

and squadrons of copters to spray

all the Boggers with whiskey and stout

but the Boggers kept chanting for freedom and love

and despite the all-sides unending bombardment

left not one drop of the poison get onto their tongues.

*

Besides, the allies of alcohol

had not reckoned on the roads

that they themselves had built

for the purposes of distributing their alcohol

but which had also stopped drinking…

and the stone cold sober and pitiless roads

simply flipped over and buried

the alcohol armies upside down and alive

as they convoyed and marched.

*

Neither had President Gin and the Chief Cider Minister

war-gamed the crows or the wind or the clouds or the fog

who each had quit drinking at the same time as

the neighbours of Bog

and conspired now to bring each of the choppers down blazing.

*

The disease ridden shacks the Boggers had lived in

collapsed

the enormous toxic factory in which some of the

the men had occasionally laboured

for alcohol

dissolved into dust

the little church blew up

the corner shop, the primary school,

the telephone poles, the roadlights, the walls and the steps,

disappeared.

*

Then with the help of the wind and the dogs and the crows

the victorious people of the disadvantaged rural neighbourhood of Bog

closed over with woodland

the village and all of their region

and closed over with woodland

all the roads that had flipped over and

buried the alcohol armies

for woods are the way-of-forgetting

all the roads and the regions

woods are the way of back-to-beginnings

the best way of starting again.

*

From then on the victorious people of Bog

would live on and chant in their freedom

in the midst of this forest of yew and of oak

of aspen and hawthorn and birch

trees which would mind them

and raise them as children of gods

who’d respond to their love and their communal chanting

and where the free people who used be from Bog

would never be spied never be caught

never again be entrapped in a neighbourhood

as long as they stayed off the alcohol.