A History of Madness 8

Once I was proud of the things I had learned.

Any moment could remind me of another—

Ivan Grozny murdering his son could be evoked

by drinking vodka on a cold and rainy day,

the phantasms of summer evening were more terrible still

and arose of their own accord,

and any woman could be brought to life

through the touch of a different woman.

Memory is not an insurmountable thing,

but most times we are not willing

to make enough fire to entirely burn our library.

We are left with husks:

proper nouns

the shading of green in a lover’s eyes

the words she says when she is asleep.

Nearly everything is dying again.

I have been waiting for winter all year

but it does not satisfy me.

I loved a woman once and she lives on

like the pine trees that are planted

to hide a forest that has just been cut down.

Bukowski no. 23

She was so angry that she nearly had as much hate as comes through my windows with the morning sun. “How could you?” she kept saying, over and over until it began to bore me so I answered her. —Fuck if I know. I mean, I get it, sometimes I punch strangers in the face or give half my money away when rent is due. Sometimes I get arrested or jump a bus to a different state for a while or show up to work as drunk as anyone has ever been, and I know people are not supposed to make these mistakes. But some mornings you wake up and all you think about is the .38 Special revolver you buried in a safe on the northeast corner of the white oak fifty paces past the drainage ditch near mile marker nineteen. You get fired or you don’t. You get evicted or you don’t. When the choice arrives between tomorrow and today you choose today.

Bukowski no. 22

It was past last call but the bartender was still serving me,
either because I tipped well or because she liked my company.
I was having a vaguely academic discussion about drugs
with a woman who wore a string of pearls across her forehead
in imitation of a long-discarded style.
I do not think the pearls were real but I have been wrong before.

She was asking me questions I knew the answers to,
and I was fond of her because of it.

The conversation shifted to be about her life, which she spoke of
for a minute or two before suddenly asking me
“Have you ever been in love?”
as I lifted up a glass of whiskey and twisted it in the light.

If a car had been on fire in the parking lot
I would not have been able to look away.
I ordered four more whiskeys and I told her
“yes”
and the next morning I walked the three miles to work
and before I tried to sell anything over the phone
I went to a vending machine to buy a Sprite
and the next thing I knew my cheek was on the cool tile
and I saw the world like a mouse would.
I checked to make sure I wasn’t bleeding and I wasn’t
and soon people rushed over to me.
Someone took me home so that they wouldn’t have to fire me
and as soon as the bar opened at three in the afternoon
I went there again.

A History of Madness 7

I stood on a slab of concrete
killing ants.

When I was a younger man I knew their Latin name,
I could define their mandibles and thoraxes
but now I crush them
by the hundred beneath my heel.

I believe, though I do not know why,
that their dying sends a chemical signal to the others.
I see them shy away from a fallen friend,
but what does an ant know of death
and why should it be feared?

There were two carrying a corpse larger than they were,
the others scurried past them but they walked crab-legged
across the concrete slab without getting anywhere.
I chose one and smashed him right through the brain.
The other struggled, unaware that his comrade had died—
he carried the worm first one way and then the other,
he tangled it in the fallen leaves, he abandoned it
but none of the other hundreds took up that burden.
He waited for about fourteen seconds then walked along the line the other ants had made.

I watched him, my eyes focused on his black armor,
and I thought of her
so small against my chest,
her black hair flowing all around
while the devil told me his daughter’s name.

I let the ant go into the hive after he tore up a piece of a butterfly
and placed it in his jaws before beginning the long walk home.
I will kill him tomorrow.

Magicicada

She watched her father at the bar. She was about fourteen and already knew more about men than anyone could teach her. He does not talk to the women but he’ll talk to anyone else. Two boys are on the bar-stools beside her, but they do not stare at his glass of beer like she does, they do not count the refills with growing dread. Still she was not broken, only bored. Years later I was reading certain short stories of Guy de Maupassant until the barmaid mentioned that she had never read him. I wrote my name and address inside the book’s cover and handed it over. I paid my bill and said to her “Never let a man tell you that you are a pearl.” She did not understand and I did not understand and I walked home and went to sleep while the thirteen-year cicadas screamed into the night.