I is Nobody

[rowens]

Everybody asks for my ID
because I don’t have one.
I had a dream last night
where they wouldn’t let me drink because I didn’t have an ID.
I guess the people in my mind know better than me.

Even though I have a long beard
and alcohol can be smelled in the air when I sweat…
I’m not allowed in the kitchen
because once I yawned while standing too close to the stove
and a gust of my breath burned down the refrigerator…

Still, nobody will serve me.
If I get a friend, or better yet, a stranger,
to pick something up for me,
all the store clerks and all the bartenders know my regular drinks
and threaten to call the law if they try buying booze for me again.

But late at night, I stumble down the road,
down South Carolina way,
and one of my young nurses I had when I was in the sink tank,
her husband’s off working the graveyard shift.
And I drink his beer, his scotch, his brother Harmy’s moonshine,
while I massage my little nurse’s back,
the only place her healing hands can’t reach herself.

Sometimes he comes home early
and I have to make an abrupt getaway.
I can hear him yelling blocks away,
then I faintly hear her sweet voice carrying on the breeze:
“I don’t know! I don’t know! He ain’t got no ID!”