Never ring true

+ tone wrong +
I am almost drunk
Almost insensible and half deaf
Almost numb
At the edge of such darkness
Between wakefulness and sleep
Might I now to sleep succumb
Or to an undiluted sense of fun
For here I am from myself so far
From crowded minute flotsam of life
Transported from daily stresses
See in glass reflected back
Someone freed from responsibility
Store the rational civilised mind
Take upon the mantle of passion and life
Shout too loudly every word
Express views reactionary
Try every cloak of who I might be
Within this fog of self-anonymity
Switch the masks of loyalty
From society to my harried self
Feel restraint and restraints fall undone
Talk in tongues of poet repressed
Rail against strictures to restrict
Feel the heat and ice of night
Rushed addiction of a stranger's kiss
Whirl and spring in new encounters
Become a born-again libertine
And those who have recanted are the worse
Preaching their selfish devilment
To any gullible enough to hear
Escaping their every days
In a wash of sweat and beer
And I am waiting for the crash
Cold sober realisation I can still reason
That I am not free at all
I am playing counterfeit to myself
A fool in knave's clothing
Attempting to dull my own sensibilities
When as spiky spines they poke through
Undoing all attempts at moral subversion
To my own drunken self ever true
How such self-knowledge chastens me
Reveals brutish unbelly sickening
Of the poet forever cast incorrectly
As a flawed bell never rings true.