Two AM Chinese Liver Cleanse

I have a friend who drinks a little bit,
Maybe a little too often too much,
That is, if you think that the point of life

Is to extend the time that you survive
And minimize your opportunities
For being, to human society,

What a burning fragment of cosmic dust,
Self-consumed in the local atmosphere,
Is to the spiralled backbone of the night,

A silent squib of light caught by rare eyes.
He tells my wife, as she tells me, that he
Wards off the early death that snatched his friend, 

Another captive fiend of fire-water,
Water of life, whatever name you like,
By purifying his abused liver,

Organ of redemption and suffering,
With some obscure, Asian method he knows
That rules waking in the wee hours of night.

Okay. That last part, the night part, I know,
As well as I know ancient, highland malts.
But in my case I wake up around two

Not to save my liver, ungrateful wretch
Of cells the same as blood, heart, eyes, and brain,
But to save my amortal, fictive soul,

Fool of awareness, nothing, and wee hours'
Startled, sudden, waking-from-dreams insight
That we humans are all drunks, all addicts

Falling from flash-flooded rivers of life
Through the constricted slot-canyons of death,
Narrow tropes for all constrained pieties 

Or poetry, or philosophy, or
Any of the named academic fields
Of delirium where sober bores doze.

I wake up around the time that my clock
Calls the darkest hour of the night to write
I am, I am here, but I need cleansing.