Spirits Poem by Jeff Wrubel

Drain your whiskey bottle into the ocean
Refill it with your saltwater tears
Divided, or concentrated
Medicinal influx, cathartic exodus
Would the sea need your whiskey
as you did?
Does the bottle need your tears
as you do?

The earth
The body
The bottle
All empty and translucent
Without the tributaries of their hearts
Be mindful of that with which you're filled
A random and selected cabernet of emotions
You'll pour laughter, you'll leak tears
But most days you'll spend on the shelf
formulating and curating the fossil fuel
Coal into oil into blood into tears
The planet rotates an axis
A people may go through revolutions
A person is the same old jalopy
Burning those same fossil fuels
But we are the cartographers