I Loved Her

They lock the door on their room when they are going to start fucking
and I am grateful a little since I won’t have to walk in
but I never walked in and I don’t want to see their room
so I don’t know why they locked the door but they did.

I loved them some but I hated everyone and I drank as much as I could
and I’d drink shots of gin and throw them up into the toilet
and then drink more because that is the kind of man I am.

They locked their door and maybe they were happy
and maybe they made love
but probably
by five fucking thirty three in the morning they were tired
and there was no one left awake but me.

Yob Tvoyu Mat

What are you going to do with yourself? The question is necessary after a while.
You are poor, you have no prospects, all you have is an amateur education in literature and the ability to say "fuck your mother" in Russian with an atrocious accent.
In this country a man may buy ten or twenty pounds of potatoes for five dollars or a badly made knife for five dollars or a badly made meal for five dollars or he can sell his soul and get a little more. I never knew hate even when I looked into my father, but any hell would have been mine if I could see my own green eyes. In the depths of a cliche I took my mirrors down so that I would not have to see him anymore. I am in every pool of water and I curse the rain when my face splashes by the roadside.

Get Thee To

The tragedy of Ophelia is simpler than that of her love,
because she had no fucking clue what was happening.

Did Hamlet love her?
Once. Perhaps. At least that was his claim.
But he pretended to love her because it was useful-
she never understood that.
He killed her father because Polonius was in the wrong place.
She could have been Odysseus but instead she was Ophelia.

So she dies. And why?
All over a misunderstanding,
Because she was the most convenient woman that he could claim he loved.
He did not want her to die but he did not think about her much
and somewhere between the flowers and the water she knew that—
but trapped on earth with a dead father and a living madman of a prince
she chose the river and it took her home.

Hamlet felt regret for this, or at least that was the lie he told.
Who truly can say what a man feels about a women he has discarded?

He Will Give

I began living in this apartment and immediately wondered when I’d be kicked out. I paid my rent and didn’t stomp very much but I had roommates and it is difficult to predict when someone will begin to hate you. We talked about dying many times but I guess I didn’t take it seriously. We had romantic desires to perish at twenty-seven but I outlived it and I thought he would too. I am laying on the stretch of the carpet where I sleep and it’s the kind of carpet that gets very dark when rubbed one way and very light when rubbed the other so that you can never tell if it is dirty. I had to work when his body was to be visited but I would not have gone anyway. He didn’t like people that were too sentimental. In his obituary they had printed the sentence: “He was a telemarketer.” but he wasn’t, that was just what he did for a living, just that same as I did those three years we knew each other, and those nights of him riding a bike through a college town selling god-knows-what— that was what he did too and a lot of people called him a criminal and of course he was but he was a good person and he was my friend and eventually we all get killed by this goddamn world that wakes up every morning and never lets us hide. He cared about philosophy and literature and music and they called him a telemarketer. What will they call me?

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.