Orpheus

Once she hated the sun and bright-lit rooms

And here, in the blackness of Erebus

We bowed our heads in caves, hidden from stars.

Then, she learned she had been blind since childhood

And, her vision restored, she desired

The forgotten land where flowers grew wild.

Marching up the slope, she turns on her heel,

"My love, please let us leave this darkling place."

I sit as silent as a harp or stone-

Ignore the pleas, else all shall be undone.

Despise my name! Lament my unkind love!

A shade cannot live in the world above.

Bukowski no. 5

Describing a dive bar when your nose has been broken three times

is impossible, the scent cannot be pinpointed. It is something like water

and desperation- water cleans the hands and hair, fills the drinks,

water drops like rain in lazy circles on smooth concrete.

A man walks in wearing a crimson cape in the fashion of the Inquisition,

a silver cross spans the length of his spine.

Over his hair, a bandana is tied (a redundancy in Sanskrit);

it is decorated with the rising sun of imperial Japan,

an unkempt beard of five months or more thatches his face and as he walks in

the blonde woman at the jukebox begins a three-song arch of mariachi music.

I only mention the music to illustrate the fundamental unreality of all of this,

the depravity and weirdness of life that can never be found in fiction.

In different universes the woman is a brunette but the rest is the same.

Bukowski no. 4

I was feeling like a pulled tooth,

thinking about my work and how no one would publish it.

Though I have not tried very hard to gain recognition,

my obscurity begins to be infuriating.

I sit on my couch reading Yeats,

recalling a story I read when I was much younger.

It tells of Yeats's anxious tears when he first learned

that his rousing verse had lifted peasants from the land

and inspired them to arms, that boys were dying with his words

on their lips- the first of all Ireland to kill a man with beauty.

His words evade me: it would seem to me that, Yeats being Yeats,

he'd have said something that I'd remember,

and like I said I read the passage a long time ago

so it's possible that the entire memory is fraudulent,

but goddamn to write a poem like that.

Coda

Fuck all of you.

Remember me poorly if you must.

Nothing was very good but

there will not be anything from me again.

If this seems tragic, upon request I will refer you

to someone else who did it better.

This is tiring. In the whole world there are not enough drugs.

Hope is the construction crew on a highway when you don't own a car.

The other gods are dead and my vain wings are failing with the morning.

If you find a feather in the ocean's foam, remember my fall.

Bukowski no. 3

Loving a woman a thousand miles away is entirely pure,

a double vodka minutes before the hypnotic peace of sleep.

I was sitting on a black couch in a foul mood,

looking out the window of my apartment

at the snow-covered roof of the next visible building.

A squirrel leaps across three icy oak branches,

lands on the gutter and turns toward me.

It is fat from a summer that threatened at infinity

and probably has never before seen the frozen world-

the trees and sidewalks and ever-fatal automobiles all dusted white.

My stomach growls. There is food in the cupboards but I have not eaten.

Always memories or fabrications from childhood tap, pesteringly, on glass.

Maybe I should reach out with a bullet, or a hammer like a bearded god,

but Joni Mitchell's "Blue" is on the record player

and winter is no time for slaughter, even of one so small:

there is no water to wash away the red-cheeked shame that hot knives will bring,

only the crystals, unique and dying; an iron spray of tears that long to turn to stone.

Xu Chu

Perhaps if the sun were not hidden, it would shine

and blind me with this earth, hard-packed with Manchurian snow.

Peasant wine gashes beneath my eyelids,

and with the impeccable logic of fantasy

suddenly I am ten inches taller than I have ever been.

The haft of a large warhammer is fastened to my right wrist

and the weight rests heavy on my shoulder.

I am shirtless, spattered with sweat and gore.

I ignore the anachronism of my weapon-

the poppies growing on the mountainside are a memory of blood.

Below me lies a body, its face of a man or a woman,

with features morphing and twisting together so quickly

that I cannot define the setting of eyes, sharpness of brow,

or even if the mouth had time to settle in surprise.

The chest is flailed, raw as flooded fields,

pulverized by twenty pounds of granite bound to forged iron;

the throat is cut precisely (last breaths gasp like feet escaping wet sand).

Many experts seeking to understand certain fatal crimes

have found that the slashing of the neck nearly always indicates

the presence of a sexual motivation for the murder,

but what can confidently be said concerning the pyschology of dreams?

Condemned

What was it that I intended to say?

Some vague vision from the past, vacant stairs,

The stare of a sunrise, these all compete

With her handprint burning upon my cheek.

The heat on my face recalls my father,

He is not the monster I remember.