ysabetwordsmith | Poem: "The Pleasure of Escaping the Responsibility"

This is today's freebie. It was inspired by a prompt from

torc87. It also fills the "I tried being reasonable. I didn't like it." square in my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis.

"The Pleasure of Escaping from the Responsibility"

Drumph was more of a drinker
than a drunk, but now and again
he showed up at Shaeth's temple.

He drank the sacramental wine,
lounged on the benches, and
rarely bestirred himself when
it was time to put things away,
sweep the temple floor, or
do anything else useful.

"You could help," Prell said,
nudging him with her foot.

"I'm too drunk to help,"
Drumph said lazily.

"What's up with him?"
Prell grumbled. "There
are people who work when
they're way drunker than that."

"The pleasure of being drunk
is obviously the pleasure of
escaping from the responsibility
of consciousness," Trobby observed.

Shaeth sighed, leaned his broom
against the wall, and went over
to deal with the situation.

He didn't mind people
passing out in his temple,
or being hungover, or being
too drunk to walk straight.

He did, however, mind
sheer everyday laziness.

"Get up," Shaeth said to
Drumph. "You are not
too drunk to pitch in.
Everyone sober helps."

"I'm still hungover from
last night," Drumph said.

Shaeth narrowed his eyes.
He calculated the amount
of alcohol in Drumph's body,
and the other things alcohol
became after it was digested
and turned into a hangover.

There wasn't much there, but
the God of Drunks could fix that.

Shaeth snapped his fingers.

Drumph moaned in misery
and rolled away from the light,
now genuinely hungover.

"That wasn't very reasonable,"
Glenta said. "We could have
prodded him to work eventually,
and now we definitely can't."

"I tried being reasonable,"
Shaeth pointed out.
"I didn't like it."

Even though he had
become the God of Drunks,
he still had a spark of evil.

* * *

Notes:

"The 'pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness."
-- Ayn Rand