The Holy Drinker: A Prose Poem

Words by Joseph Nicolello

The first time I entered Kensington my precise thought was, “Now the gates of hell are loose’t.” I pulled over on my bicycle to scribble it on the back of a receipt for a stack of Statius, Strabo, and medieval books of penance down at the Book Trader; that is how I remember it the precise words. Tucking the receipt away, I absorbed the area: thousands of persons were, at least symbolically, locked into a condemned horizon, blocked off from the freer air and light outside its confines, damned to this satanic interzone, by huge police trucks. Needles, broken glass, and figures frozen in inhuman postures were surrounded by tents, garbage, ministers, and the police. I passed through and inferred there could be no plausible reason to ever pass through here again. Yet when I learned that one of my closest childhood friends, who had long been missing, had surfaced in Kensington, I set out to find him. This was just a month after the initial encounter. Miraculously, I found him; outside of a bar he was slouched with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, a suspiciously crisp San Francisco Giants cap atop his tattooed head. We had lived in San Francisco together. He was, at 33, in his last days. He had no interest in telling me how he had arrived here; I had no interest in commenting on his emaciated appearance, the state of his skin. There were only three things he wanted: first, a drink at the decaying tavern beside us, with bodies strewn about the entranceway floor and a scent of synthesized excrement with burning rubber in the air, where a hundred hovering eyes laced the fatal air. Second, he wanted me to know that he was no longer went by the name I knew him as, but that now he was ‘The Holy Drinker.’ My first thought was that he had in fact read the Joseph Roth books I gave him years ago, when we were young, healthy, and destined to receive the widespread acclaim as poets that we were born for, and that this slurred moniker was a reference to one of these books. But he was quick to clarify that he was named this because he was an apostle of Jesus Christ now, that all disciples undergo not just a resurrection of the heart but also a change of their name, and that, most importantly, he was going to beat fentanyl with alcohol. In completing this task, he would prove the miraculous to all of Kensington: the drugs killing everyone could be vanquished with beer and wine, and one could return to one’s old self. Third, he took a cleanlyfolded, stapled pair of generic looseleaf pages from a hidden coat pocket, with perfect cursive handwriting on it, and gave it to me. As I set the folded paper beside the receipt in my pocket, the Holy Drinker explained that this was his will and testament, and that should he die somehow on his apostolic mission, to somehow deliver the message to the nations. Or, he chuckled, at least to the Philadelphians. Less than a month later he was dead. I found out by running his birthname through a search engine. And so there is nothing left for me to do now but share the Testament of the Holy Drinker, unedited, a transcript of the disciple’s handwritten will and testament:

“The tide was way out, yes, said my counterpart, but that was when it existed. Now I see nothing but the grotesque and its overcoming. At first, I thought William Blake taught me how to sup and converse with the dead. But as I went to speak it, I realized that the dead are not even dead and that only the dead would consider this some irascible blasphemy. We are all dead here, in Hell. But behold: I am reborn; my mind is resurrected. This does not change the fact that the unreferable is found in negation. The isnot is in its not-ness all of the schools, follies, imbecilities, the design of undesigned design, is nocturnal spleen. To not happen is to happen-asabsence, it is either assumed or denied, albeit stale – muted by corrosion. One made a book of a hundred page-long descriptions of martyrs being executed in the cruelest ways possible. This was not a religious book but rather a penetrative examination of what martyrdom is. The miraculous was everywhere in the Tenderloin, where my apostolic work began, and now it is everywhere in Kensington. Blessed are the poor in spirit! I write by candlelight in a vacant building, rats skimpering around me… but I have a quart of whiskey, ten cans of beer, and 80 cigarettes… so who cares. But I was saying, about my book of martyrs: There was not an artist who did not love the idea, while at the same time declining to illustrate it. I sold it to a tourist for fifteen dollars. Now we all know that the man of gifts sees himself empty-handed, and that the woman of light gleams in eternal darkness. I cannot see into your soul. I cannot even see into tomorrow. But I see your art and venerate the mind on fire. The most reprehensible thing on earth, I think each morning and midnight, must be the present moment. Therefore, I destroy it, and it feels so good and holy to destroy it, that I take no issue with my methods destroying me. Time destroys everything, and time does not even exist outside of orality and symbol: thus, I kill time by killing myself. But that is the old me, before I beat heroin, fentanyl, all of it, with good old drinking. Greater and lesser minds indicate the ordering of interior oblivion-form giving motion the illusion of stillness. The object of reality being the idea of the idea. There is no more debating Greek concepts anymore. Just a microchip concerning the cave of allegory’s colors of the mind. We see the evil walls of censorship arise, the sea of drugs, oblivion, and longing.

Fear not. Here is the Valley of the Shadow of Death: it is not a place but Reality itself. Now it is time for the aesthetic assassins. My kingdom is often not of this world; but when it is, I demand nothing less than anarchy of the imagination. For in ways, linguistic-itself –language as the knowledge of death, and death the postscript of nothingness’s inception of Being – is ceiling or sky one wants to say ‘the senses’, but then these senses are words, or a systematicity of barriers. Demolition of the colosseum. Teenagers smoking in a diner surrounded by senior-citizens. Broad Street sunset. Cruelty is a teacher, a pedagogical method. Allegorical sins; allegorical world; allegorical taking-away. Last night in prison Moses came to me in a vision and I asked him what he thought of the state of poetry. He told me, his horns glistening with unverifiable liquid traces, that he stopped reading poetry the day Jack Spicer died. He did this because Spicer had said, “Poet, be like God”, and drank himself to death, and that there was nothing else to do or say with poetics on that ground. Now we need apocalyptic thinking, monasteries for atheists. My task is through redemption to counter the apocalypse of truth with the truth of apocalypse. One writes with a posthumous postage-stamp in mind, hostage to profane misnomers, transposition ciphers. There is either conviction, or termination in the convictionless. Adorned with the heavy cloak of memory. Remember what you would miss were you to dwell in another plane, which is less preposterous than it sounds, considering we are here. There is perhaps no profaner fall than gambling. But if one is to gamble, gamble on the safe bet of pessimism. Blessed are the nihilists, the despisers of all human systems, for reality shall be theirs. The futility of all systems. Smile, ye laureled muses, and bless us with thine glorious, abscessed teeth of youth. Memory of love embodied touch, the hand, wisdom’s lips taken too soon, taken at all, my hollow longing destroys me if just once the ghost or angel might speak, provide a sign, prophets of extremity in descent. Imaginary readers: Homerica, Homeric Hymns. Before he spontaneously combusted, Moses asked me to define the self in two words. I said, melancholy’s hostage. One is hostage until the saving power of art comes back around. Until then, in the purgatory of oblivion, even mercy becomes undesirable.

Misapprehension-asforeground: fragments like the dice of drowned men’s bones. The pity of intrigue; the intrigue of pity. Memory of schoolroom, art boxes, smocks, supplies, clock, alarm, looming summer. Perfume of sticker books on 18 th and Locust. I am the wanderer. Phoebus plays his lyre nocturne, I spread Mother Nature’s leaves, Muses deliver my poisoncolored crown. Obscurity is perpetual reflection. Looking through warped dock slits into the prurient mirror of the sky. “I fear a cigar would lead to other legal things”, said the ringmaster. Silent music. Hieroglyphic of departure: yearning, yearning, petrified, forlorn. Building frames. The ambiguities: and silence becomes this grave. Even the rats have gone to sleep. Blessed are the peacemakers! Ah, a will and testament – just remember that, I once read in a book, that whoever loses her mind shall find it. Remember to be artists and love one another. I was an artist but never told anyone, and then I died. I regret nothing. Love one another. More anarchy of the imagination. More love. Now back to my bottle! I toast ye, my reader!”

Thus spake the Holy Drinker.