The Dark Lonely Street by Christopher J Ananias

the dark lonely street

accompanies my staggering gait

with its nice little houses

judging me in their wake

The Lord’s steeple rises

I look with a hopeful bleakness

wanting to be a child again

loosed of the drunkard’s curse

greeted by a shadow’s, clink, clink

whipping around a dark cornice

Like the slash of a whip!

wrinkled up mouth, teeth, and no lips

a barking pious creature of contempt

a charging malevolence

ending its disdain in its chain

hating my low whiskey stink

pushed away from the Lord

into the doldrums of drink

I walk toward Jesus or further

draining my dandelion wine

alcohol robbing me

of everything dear

A lackluster career

of dreary consequence

seems to be my creed

a conflicting,

failing need

I hit the bottle like, life

after breadth and reach of town

finally, I make like coming around The Horn

I catch sail

to my mother’s home

to the enablement

of her generosity

I step light as lead

to my childhood’s room and bed

Christopher J Ananias

(Image by CJA)

9 thoughts on “The Dark Lonely Street by Christopher J Ananias”

  1. Hi Christopher

    Coincidentally, I read this one just after the LS piece today by M. R. Davey. Tremendously haunting. Often we are pushed along, by criminals, by fate, by booze.

    Well done and that image you took, that is on file, fits it perfectly.

    Leila

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  2. chrisja70778e85b8abd's avatar chrisja70778e85b8abd says:

    Hi Leila

    I’ll have to check that story out on LS.

    Yes, these obsessions that drive people to madness are worthy subjects to exercise the pen.

    Fate is like the undertow, you step into the day you are born. Crying all along that your life has a plan.

    Thanks!

    CJA

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  5. DWB's avatar DWB says:

    Ananias

    I’ve read this 36-line poem at least ten times since it was generously sent by yourself to the Springs and I can say with great confidence that it’s like a kaleidoscope, the same device every time which also changes radically every time you return to it.

    Each line in this piece has its own weight and the sense of the movement in the poem is inescapable. The last time I read it this morning it seemed like Melville’s Moby Dick, the protagonist of this poem on his own underground sailing journey through the landscape just like Captain Ahab across the seas except this protag’ ends up in home his bed like Ishmael and not the watery floor of the sea strapped to a whale like Ahab.

    If there were any justice in the world, this poem would appear in the annual collection Best American Poetry except that it’s too good, and NOT concerned with surface-level and shallow, politically-correct identity politics which is the subject of almost every single poem in those volumes now.

    There’s something going on deep below the surface in this poem. It is not about shallow identity politics, but it IS about identity. The narrator is a drunk drinker, and maybe even “a drunk,” but the careful reader gets the strong sense of the search for identity just beneath the surface. The search for identity is ALWAYS strongest in the people who already know who they are on some level, which is another one of life’s eternal ironies, part of the yin and yang of this existence.

    This poem seems emotionally and physically brutal the first few times because of the narrator’s drunk journey, but on multiple readings it morphs into something much more positive, too.

    And it all has to do with THE SEARCH.

    The Search never ends, or when it does end for people, they end too, as people.

    Brilliant in every word and every line, this poem creates a character of great depth in a mere 36 short lines!

    DWB

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  7. chrisja70778e85b8abd's avatar chrisja70778e85b8abd says:

    Hi Dale

    Thanks for the great and thought provoking comments!

    It was one of those from years ago and rewritten.

    Glad the searching part came through.

    Awesome comments about Captain Ahab strapped to a whale on the ocean’s floor!

    Added some sailor terms to make it seem like a journey, or symbolize one. I can remember stumbling around drunk at night for hours getting nowhere, lol. One time I swam through a swamp wearing a leather jacket, after wrecking my motorcycle with the cops on my ass!

    Thanks on the picture!

    It was a picture caught on the deer cam with my rechargeable stocking cap light. Those lights are very useful!

    Thanks again for your insightful and generous comments!

    CJA

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    • DWB's avatar DWB says:

      Christopher

      HA HA HA!!! about swimming through a swamp wearing a leather jacket after wrecking a motorcycle and trying to escape the coppers!!!!

      I remember staggering around through the city, the country, or the suburbs completely wasted and not knowing where I was. More than once I did things like collapse under the bushes somewhere and sleep it off. Waking up in such a condition and not quite remembering how you got there at first is a memory I cherish more than one might imagine. No wonder I love Kerouac’s poem SKID ROW WINE so much (that and his poem “Heaven” are my favorite works by him).

      The symbolic nature of the journey aspect worked out marvelously well in “The Dark Lonely Street.”

      Keeping a poem for twenty years only to finish it later is an artistic stroke of great daemonic brilliance, NOT a simple fall-back on old work previously done.

      Poetry is, of course, meant to be around for a while (a long, long while), good poetry, I mean.

      So twenty years is nothing in the scheme of things.

      They don’t know how long, exactly, Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa (on and off), but the best guess is decades, minimum (with long stretches away from it). Also a painting he never sold and never took money for – now the most famous painting in the world (by far).

      Dale

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      • chrisja70778e85b8abd's avatar chrisja70778e85b8abd says:

        Hi Dale

        Lol about the swamp! That’s a good way to look at it–our adventures into the wastrels of the night.

        I can relate to the suburbs and staggering around lost. It happened on a visit to my sister’s in Denver. I went to some dive bar on the tail end of a three day drunk, must have smoked four packs of cigarettes that night, then got lost–all on foot. City blocks aren’t like town blocks.

        SKID ROW WINE sounds like the one to read!

        Thanks
        CJA

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