Cameron, this time I’m in luck. I reread “The Bacchae” only a couple months ago. Easily one of the most bizarre and fascinating works in world literature.
You're not a god: I think you gave up drinking.
But not the city, which you still allow
to drown you in. You talk: as if you're sinking,
I hold your arm. Is it me or Pentheus now
In other words, you can’t be the god of wine, because you’ve stopped drinking, but the city hasn’t stopped drinking, and you allow it to drown you.
If you want the “which” clause to be conventionally grammatical, you need to lose “in” or add “it” at the end. (De-relativized, it’s “You still allow the city to drown you in.”) If it’s language play, then “drown in” sounds like a phrasal verb, “drown you in” becoming similar to “draw you in.”
stumbling after his guide, girlish & blind
with seeing? Still, like him I half resist
listening, since if I listen then I'd find
myself starting to see like you: with the fixed
It’s grammatically unclear who’s “girlish & blind” and resists listening, but while Dionysus and Pentheus in his getup are both “girlish,” only the latter is unseeing and unlistening. The N, like Pentheus (though probably not in drag), is being led into the drunken, stoned Bacchic revels of the city—potentially to his destruction.
& washed-up clarity of the drowned. You're brav-
er than me with this city's needle-veined
Bacchae who've also learnt not to believe
in Presidents or free will. Josh: who'd go sane
I get tet in L2 unless I stress “this,” which seems unnatural, and the line then scans as anapest + iamb + trochee + trochee + “veined.” Tet’s easier, and I’m fine with the odd short or long line, so forget I said anything.
If you’re addressing Josh, please use a comma, but Clarkean colonic philosophy suggests that you may be doing something else altogether.
beneath the billboards' on-off mania?
or go cold turkey to the siren light?
You are the mask of my insomnia
noting each entropy, each half-life of night:
With “You are the mask,” you move into different territory that I’m still trying to map.
the blast shadows of bars that haunt you with
absence's red taste. There is no god
you say, to give us choice, but still it's this
old work (who'd pay?) that's chosen you: to hold
“Red taste” sounds like the “red breath” of Zenkevich and Mandelstam. I found a great answer on the web to the question “What does the color red taste like?”—“Something like pink, only harsher.”
With “half-life,” “blast shadows” and decaying atoms, the dangers of drugs and alcohol shift toward nuclear annihilation and, with “entropy,” toward the heat death of the universe. It’s Josh, with his poetry, who is holding off the end:
these ghosts atomed inside you from decay,
as what night builds annihilates by day.
I suppose you mean “is annihilated.” I don’t find a suitable intransitive sense, so “annihilates by day” has to be understood as “destroys by day.”
BTW, Terence Stamp played a stunning Dionysus, but sadly only in key scenes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge4ynDhFVsg.