Bukowski no. 15

Walking down the road half drunk I say to myself-

If I had a little more money it’d be alright.

I get inside.

I smile and palm over six bucks

for six beers with an American flag on the label,

and I don’t even like the taste.

I walk back on down the road and

everything is wrong here.

The roads and stores are full of Yankees

and if you look inside the street-side windows

instead of some dirty methheads humping away their hatred

all you can see are the rejects of Normal Rockwell.

If I had a little more money it’d be alright,

no one would bother me,

I would never have to go out

and someone would bring bottles of red wine

and multivitamins

to my doorway and I’d tip them generously.

People would listen to me when I was full of shit

and tell me I was a genius and I would believe them.

There’s a bum on the corner with his asscrack hanging out,

too tired or cold to beg

and something in him shows that he ain't got five dollars to rub together

or five bucks of beer,

but he can tell that I do.

If I had a little more money I'd never have to fucking see him

and maybe then I wouldn't have to see myself either.

Bukowski no. 14

I ate the leftover spaghetti with two meatballs,

then heated up some macaroni with shredded cheese on top

and drowned it with hot sauce.

Twenty minutes after that I was still out of beer

so I got the cheesecake box out of the fridge.

There were two pieces left

wild blueberry

and

strawberry original,

I could have chosen one but the box was coming apart

so I chose both.

I brought the plate with two forks to the bedroom

but she didn’t want any

so I shrugged and ate both pieces.

They tasted

just like the names promised they would

and I really gotta look for a job tomorrow

but not tonight.

Carmen 48

My woman and I had to move a fish tank,

a real big bastard that held around 150 gallons.

I didn’t really want to do it so I was drinking before she woke

on a Sunday. I ran out of beer, but that doesn’t matter so much

north of the Mason-Dixon line, so I walked four blocks

to the convenience store with death metal

playing in my headphones.

I bought a lot of beer and didn’t flirt with the cashier

and started walking home. Two blocks down I looked to the left

and there were all these toys on the lawn,

strewn like they’d been thrown from a doorway.

Every one of them made noise. There was a fake conga drum,

a push-button guitar with the batteries removed,

a xylophone with keys in rainbow colors and broken mallets,

and some others. I could almost make a band,

but Sunday isn’t garbage day.

I got stuck there holding my beer, curious

until I remembered how many times I’d bought beer walking down this road

and heard a man yelling at someone inside.

I put the beer down and piled the toys together delicately,

as if I was afraid of making a scratch.

The xylophone and drum and what the fuck ever

stood there in a solemn tripod.

I hope it made the kid feel better.

Maybe it would have made me feel better,

if someone had done a thing like that for me.

Hell if I know, I didn’t have toys like that.

I got home and pushed the door in.

One of the dogs was laying on the kitchen floor

atop a heap of refuse: old aquarium filters, ruined shoes,

clothes that smelled like dirt and piss and dogshit.

She was smiling.

I have a lot to learn from her.

Bukowski no. 13

Fuck if I know why I was talking to the bank

at nine at night,

but she asked me to call them.

I performed poorly on the call, pissed her off somehow,

and then she said something sharp to me.

I can’t remember what she said

but I remember

afterward

the throbbing heat

in my ears and under both cheekbones.

My guitar tuner told me I hadn’t tuned my instrument

in thirty one days. What kind of goddam machine scolds you

for lack of practice? Such a modern world.

I sat on my bed and played really bad 12 bar blues in E

for fifteen minutes. It went on until my fingertips started to go numb.

It sounded worse and felt better the longer I played.

Ain’t a convenient way to end this coming to mind,

so I guess I’ll cap it off by mentioning

that it was cold and rainy outside today,

and if you’re gonna narrow your eyes at me

you better have a knife in hand or a guitar for me to play.

The Fourth Bruce

I read it,

the fourth volume.

Eleven poems,

three short stories.

It started out with some lazy shit I would have written four years ago-

a ham-handed fusion of the Norse gods with the Greek,

tied together with fabricated meter.

Some of it was overly clever. Hell, maybe I did write it-

So much artifice, an irrelevant theme of stinging insects...

Who can remember every line?

Some of what followed was better.

Mobbs, I always want to throw you something

but I am afraid that you won't publish it

and I am afraid you will.

Good, I Detest Flamands

Somehow I ended up on a battlefield, Ypres I suppose,

though the year is now two thousand fourteen.

Like firecrackers or gunpowder,

at rare occasions in the night

a long forgotten bomb smiles at the air

and gives up the ghost.

Which explosions are the good ones?

Surely the ones that kill the other men, that fire

is the fire of god.

Asking one question asks another, it is said,

the opposite,

but that is a question that I cannot answer

without other questions.

God will not come in fury from the earth for me,

God wants me to eat olives and grow old.

Carmen 47

She lays on her side, her breath a smokestack,

A raincloud or a powerplant, and what am I?

I could sing a nursery rhyme, one hand

On my heart and the other on her hip,

But my voice changed and I forgot the words.

I walk through a forest with reddened eyes-

Death is a woman, so kiss me, my dear,

Tell me the things that a man likes to hear.

Bukowski no. 12

I was supposed to give a friend input on what he wrote.

Perhaps I even intended to write him notes in the margins,

to write a compliment to his vision and effort,

but there were other things on my mind.

I read what he wrote and I liked it,

but for the last seven months

I’ve been really fucked up about Cicero getting killed

so I didn’t know how much I could help.

Bukowski no. 11

So what if Shulgin died? It matters not.

Cancer took him, swift and sure as meter.

The handle of this coffee cup is steel.

It is true that men must die but not I,

not I.

I have stared into derelict mirrors,

My hate like an old strand of wheat pasta.

“No man can kill me!”I claim this loudly.

No man would wish to. This torch will burn out.

Still Shulgin is dead, my poor friend Sasha,

Who dreamed of a world that had never been.

Now the angels break bread with him and sing his songs.

Bukowski no. 10

spent the last thirty minutes explaining why Malcolm X is important to me

while my girlfriend picked at my flesh

why is the beer so limited

oh god.

Bukowski no. 9

Things changed a little I suppose.

I moved to New York. The time zone is different.

The cigarettes are more expensive but I still don’t smoke them.

I’ve got the collected fiction of Franz Kafka bound in black paper

sitting overtop the bathroom cupboard-and-mirror

and let me tell you

every time someone takes a shower, the book dies a little more-

the moisture slides up the spine.

I didn’t write much lately and I guess I’m supposed to care about it.

Really there was nothing going on. The earth went around the sun.

This woman I worked with, she had a boyfriend die

in a car accident with her, it sounded romantic.

Marquez fucking died.

When he went into the hospital I said it was impossible,

but he is dead. What do I care about her dead boyfriend?
I would trade a million dead men for another Marquez.

Hell I don’t know what to say about anything.

Mobbs I read your poem the other day and I liked it

but like I said

lately I’ve been reading a lot of Kafka.

Dirge

I was bundled up in layers, walking aimlessly down the road

while cold rain and hailstones fell upon my collar.

I stepped over a ditch and green duck shit, got my shoes wet,

and stopped on a wooden plank bridge that overlooked the pond

(which is not really a pond but more of a reprieve for drainage ditches).

I was watching the runoff roil in, this frigid mass of new-torn sediment

and leaves, cigarette butts and cigarette packs, foil candy wrappers

and anti-depressants and Valium metabolites and every other suburban thing

and the murky water became darker and darker as I stared.

Out near the center the pond became clearer, and impossibly

a circle of iridescent water shimmered for a moment then was broken like a mirror.

I stood there with my eyes fixed on that point and shed my tears of grief

for Philip Seymour Hoffman, an artist, taken by heroin at age forty-six.

Meditation 7

You do not fall asleep lamenting that you were not born to be an emperor. Why then trouble yourself that you are not fated to have love?

True, other men are not so tall or touched by madness as you. Do you envy them? What would you sacrifice in order to live like that?

You are not one of them. Do not act surprised that you do not have one of their lives.

Meditation 6

You would not give a scorpion a ride across a river, why then would you trust a woman to keep her word? The moon may tell the truth every day, but ever it sings a changing song.

A man can get a good deal on a used car.

Meditation 5

“No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”

Meditation 4

That we do not expect Artemis to avoid the woodlands under the moon, nor do we require that Ares change his bedroom decorations.

That there are so many pretty women in the world, and that with enough time you could make each of their lives worse than before. And that you would.

That you would not go camping if you always burned the forest down.

Meditation 3

To remember that positive qualities often serve to mask personality deficiencies.

That you have forgotten so much of what you have learned. The aesthete, the intellectual, the artist. To not be a mirror.

That the most outrageous lies are meant to be discovered, so that the truth can remain hidden.

Meditation 2

That discomfort should be received with enthusiasm. So your feet hurt? You have spent years off of them, and they are being toughened.

To take pleasure in hard work - in lifting, sweating, breathing steam. Every day stronger, every day a few dollars richer.

To never again be where you have been.

Meditation 1

To use the proper cloth to patch a hole. To remember that self pity is weakness- like wine, like women. Like everything. To know that apple trees stand strong though their branches are warped beneath the weight of life.