Piss Bottle

He was a world champion alcoholic.

Moving slowly.

Leaving a grey muceousy trail

That had the whole house 

Smelling of piss.

Incoherently gifted.

Shuttered.

Shuffling.

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

He forgot about the coffee

Boiling on the orange coils

In a banged up aluminum

Stove-top percolator

For twenty-three minutes.

He finally drank it anyway

Without raising an eyebrow

Pouring and gulping

The scalding sludge

Like a caveman.

He was dead inside.

He offered me some

Of the thick burnt tar

Grunting

In a true gesture

Of momentary neanderthal hospitality.

“No thank you.”

I told him.

“I’ll pass.”

He was living

The not so simple life

Not so simply

Simply.

The cartography

Of his daily movement

Was a small map

Worn into the pile

Of faded carribean blue 

Wall-to-wall carpet.

An occassional trip outside

To check the mailbox.

Entrapped in his own mephitic flesh

Walking like a misplaced spirit

Between the recliner on the first floor

Of the split level rancher

To the covered back porch

Where he would smoke

His generic brown leaf wrapper

Septic smelling

Cigarettes

Purchased at a Trenton bodega.

The recliner was his bed.

One of the only pieces of furniture that he owned

Besides the dining room table and sole chair

Which serviced as the podium

For his best working typewriter

Of the forty or so

He had collected

And had lined up

Against the yellowed peeling

Flor-de-lis wallpaper

Of the dining room.

He was compulsive about collecting things.

The garage was full

Of useless bike frames he had pulled out of the trash.

The desk lamp next to the typewriter

Was turned on the whole time

I was there.

I asked him about it.

We were on the porch and he was smoking.

It reeked of piss.

“What are you working on?”

I asked him.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

He slurred through coffee breath

Browned and missing teeth

Ochre eyes moving slowly

In their pus-filled sockets.

“The typewriter in the other room.”

I nudged.

“I’ve been working on a book.”

He acknowledged.

“It’s a struggle. My whole life is a struggle.”

“What in the fuck is that?!!!”

I exclaimed

Catching a filthy half-filled urinal bottle

To the left of his feet

Under the table

Next to the sofa.

“It’s a piss bottle!”

He jumped at me defensively.

“I got them all over the house.”

“Sometimes I can’t make it to the john or I can’t get up and I just piss into one of these.”

He picked it up showing me.

I felt nauseous.

It was the kind you see in a hospital.

He swirled around 

A deep brown-yellow concoction

From a sick liver

In a dirty frosted plastic bottle

With a once white cap.

“From the smell of this place I would have to conclude that you miss the bottle a lot.”

I said

Putting my forearm in front of my nose

To keep from retching.

He snubbed out his smoke

In the overflowing ashtray

And put the bottle back down.

“Jesus, you’re fucked!”

I told him.

“You really are a fucked-up sonuvabitch!”

“Thanks for the news-flash asshole!

He replied.

“You think that it’s easy to maintain this image of beauty?”

“I couldn’t do it.”

I said.

We smoked more cigarettes

And talked

But he never told me 

What he was writing about.

When I got up to leave

I stopped in the half-bathroom

By the front door

To take a leak.

It was the one that he used

Obviously.

The toilet was caked with hard urine

As well as the tiles around it.

The wall to the left of the toilet

And the wall in back 

Had large patches of smudges

Where his black greasy hands

Repeatedly tried to steady 

His poisoned body

While he took a leak. 

I noticed an old school shaving set

On top of the feculent sink.

The brush was worn down

Stiff from never being cleaned.

There were several rusted steel double-edge blades

Strewn over the stained porcelain.

I got out of there without touching anything

And left thinking

“What a fucked-up-shit-hole mess.”

The evidence was all there.

But I never saw him drink

I never saw him use the piss bottle

And I never saw him at the typewriter.