"Cope"

It's not an ability to cope
When all he deals with is absolutes,
Numbers on papers and trends and facts,
The change is a change on national level;
He doesn't have to cope.

He didn't have to cope when she got sick,
Frail in a lily-white room
With machines pumping life through tubes,
The girl he saw grow reduced to a picture;
He didn't have to cope.

He didn't cope when the wall grew,
The partition between love and law,
As she became more distant
And more of a ghost even than he;
He didn't have to cope.

Instead he found life by day
In pages of numbers and
Flashing streams of light on Wall Street,
In function and reason, cause and reaction-
Life in a neat and ordered world.

And then he found life at night
At the bottom of a bottle,
Liquid relief that burned and soothed
That made things bearable, or so he claimed,
LIfe in the dark-lit streets under neon lights.

He leaned back in the plastic chair
Stiff and uncomfortable, made for grade-school kids
He certainly didn't fit
He was not some victim needing a 12-step program
With terms like "strength" and "willpower" and
-Shudder- "forgiveness"
He was a man in control
An upright man that didn't cope
Instead, things coped to him
This wasn't his place; these people were fools
He was doing nothing wrong
Words like addiction and problem
Didn't describe him
This wasn't his world, wasn't his life
And yet...

And yet he sat there listening.
He had found a way to the downtown office,
In the basement of the church,
Listening to these men prattle on;
Yet he sat there, listening.