Liquid Courage. 

It’s working and waiting, grinding and sweating. Potatoes fermented, sugarcane distilled, barley malted — years of fertilization and production. Until on this particular night, at this particular bar, inside this particular glass, the poison is poured and consumed without thought of its past or the future it possesses: yours now, mine now, in the blood, in the brain, taking root. Choice is empty, freewill dry, like the glass now. The only desire is to be wet again.

Music teases feet to move toward another soul, both wading in liquid courage. But courage is not courage that won’t stand up against the easy evil pleasures of skin colliding, of a counterfeit kiss, and the rhythm, the friction, of a thigh revealed from a dress. The next note, the discord, the tension of a hand on a neck that moves down a back as slowly as the drop of sweat it creates. The lyric, lips half open without sound, gravitates to a cheek, a collarbone, a rib cage. It’s close, maybe touching — but not yet — maybe only breathing breath into the pores of the skin of another.

The poison infiltrates, executing the plan as it was grown and designed to do. The human heart breaks and turns back to the same steps of the same song, emptying the same glass, executing only disappointment — trying and failing to be what it was created to be.

Drowning now, it can only succumb to a new master: to never be dry, never be empty, again.