The Last Man on Earth

Though starvation is the constant worry of life,

the scourge of solitude can easily be as dangerous to the living.

Would it have been different if I somehow had maintained

a miraculous radio for all these passed years and kept in contact

with some few other survivors, scattered o’er the globe?

“Giovanni,” I would say, “I woke today and was hungry

and alone. I feel like dying. I must go get water and check the sky.”

He would sympathize and tell me a story of his departed grandsons.

“Sakuntala,” I would say, “I woke today and was hungry

and alone. I feel like dying. I must go get water.”

She would sympathize and sing for me.

I do not know if a very good radio would have made things different.

My eyes have faded and I can no longer read the books on my shelves;

two or three words emerge then disappear in spirals.

It would be better if every part of my library was replaced

with a facsimile in a foreign language, for in that desolation

there would at least be some solace for the educated.

But the words are not scrambled, they are lost.

What is the season? Somewhere between spring and summer,

if my reckoning is accurate, but there are not meadows,

no birds or blue-corn skies to see. It has all been broken

somehow; I know not how. The world is grey

and it has been years since I glimpsed a cockroach.

Now, without humans, they are driven to the fens.

For this day I saved a can of pinto beans, a can of sliced carrots,

and a can of new potatoes. The idea reminded me of being young.

For dessert, a can of pears (lite, packed in water).

If you gave me a million words, I couldn’t tell you

what a fine dinner that meal was to me.

I was eating the pear halves and the pear halves

ran out. They were packed in water but I drank every drop

and there was not anyone to share it with.

Now everything is gone. I miss my sisters.

I hope that somewhere there are purple flowers and happy granddaughters.

A Romance

I was above her, looking in her eyes.

-My dear, I will want to harm you, I said.

-I do not want you to hurt me, she said.

-Though I will not hurt you, I will want to.

Now, come to my arms and embrace a savage man.

Qualis artifex pereo

How has it come to this? So short a time ago

I had all that could be wanted, but I thought too frequently

of art. I considered my enemies too rarely.

The immortals punish vanity, as I have often proved.

Of my mother I will not speak, here where the trees are tall and green

and forgiving of faults; they who have outlasted storms

are contemptuous of their wind-broken relations.

I have walked the path of many who have died on unfair blades,

and so am unsurprised to find that my fate is similar.

Shall I be damned for necessary violence

or for flames I never cast upon my fair city?

Are those hoof-beats? Epaphroditus, I have not the courage

that my task demands. I must ask a final service.

Quickly now, I can hear the horses!

The knife.

Thank you for your kindness, old friend.

Tell me that my songs will be remembered.

Alexander Magnus

I like the taste of cayenne pepper, cheap wine in one-gallon jars,

loud music and the way that hearts of strong men wrestle against the knife,

but what I really like is a beautiful woman that I don’t love.

If she is proportioned as in pornography or reality, it is no matter.

It is only important that my emotions are not muddled with my memory,

it is only that the body of this woman can never be confused with my mind.

Have I seen beauty?

Yes, in the unmarried child of India who shames the bride at her own wedding,

the daughter of Florida, living in islands of the sea, who is more lovely than the sun,

and also my eyes have found the foam-born as she plants a garden and sharpens a spear.

One day history named a man Raphael,

and admired the master that transferred

a divine form onto suffocated canvas-

some years later, the world has forgotten his biography.

I am not pious. I resurrect Raphael for a moment

and whisper promises into his ear

as the Christ was once tempted upon a barren mountain.

Primed colors are on canvas, the sky is blue,

her flesh is obscured by the sun.

Unread Pages

You wore something, else I should remember rather more of the story.

As it was, I remember your hair pinned up so that your neck

was exposed softly while it gestured at the sun,

the calm way you walked in beauty

through parts of an afternoon, and I am happy

that you are in the heart of another-

not because this means that I can never have you,

but because this means that I can never hurt you.

For Israel

My friend, if I could take upon myself

Your burden, I would do you that favor;

I too have heard despair knock on my door

While forgotten dreams held me as captive

To their caprices, and then awoken

To find that dark fantasy just as real

As the lamented dead in newspapers.

Is your body imprisoned by your pain

And memories? Oh, if there were solace

In a blade or crashing automobile,

I have no doubt that you may choose that course;

I beg you not to perish before I find death.

You saved my life, how could I bear your funeral?

Concerning Evidence

The box is about nine inches square and four inches tall;

the material is a cheap synthetic brown leather.

It is hinged and within it are many torn and ruined pieces of paper,

as well as empty plastic wrappers that once held now-forgotten chemicals.

These torn and rootless scraps are on ruled notebook paper

or the back of envelopes, or upon napkins- drafts written in pen

when my black notebooks were out of reach.

I shredded them during a fit of madness, some months ago.

My demon love was in the other room

but eventually came to investigate the sounds of tearing and my sobs.

Among these fragments, an unused line from an early draft of my Furies poem:

“the prefect Orestes descended,” then from number 15 of my Carmina,

“my fingers in your hair” and “wondered how,”

then I find the only needle I ever put into my arm,

then a picture of my face and shoulders

taken when I was fifteen and still brimful of lust and rage.

Immediately after I throw the box in the dumpster, none of this will have occurred.

Bukowski no. 8

After the cigarettes, there is nothing left but sunrise.

The dark becomes filtered and blue

and the Asian lady next door will soon be going to work.

Once a friend asked me, “Why do women like clichés?”

I had no answer for him on that day, but now,

as the leaves are black and the dew is light on the grass,

I understand. After a woman is charmed,

she believes that the world contains no other women.

Walden 2.01

At present, I have acquired few of the supplies that I shall be taking into the forest. I have secured permission to live on several acres of land. I have no assets to speak of, but enjoy (for a while longer) a very modest income.

I was offered use of a tent, but refused because of the shelter’s weight (this was when my plan involved moving through a National Forest). I am hopeful that this charity will be extended again, for if it is, I shall have satisfied the need for shelter. I will have to purchase a tarp, and much cordage. This should not cost more than twenty-five dollars.

I have acquired a very good knife called a Mora, after the Swedish town in which the style originated. The blade is good thick steel, the tang is three-quarters of the grip. I do not own a hone or multi-tool, and will have to purchase these things. I hope to get them for less than thirty dollars, and that should get me a multi-tool good for five or more years.

I have purchased a marvelous water filter, called a Lifestraw. It has no moving parts and weighs only two ounces, and filters out particulates and contaminates that are larger than 0.2 microns: good for 1k liters (a year for an active average-sized adult male). The land on which I will stay has running water within its rights, and so I shall have no worry of thirst. For my fires, I will use a flint and steel- cheap, yet to be bought.

For sleeping arrangements, I will have a sleeping bag with a mat beneath it ( I hope to claim ownership of the sleeping bag I used in my youth, red, with the name PARKER written at one end to contrast it with PATRICK’s sleeping bag). Because my camp is semi-permanent, I may bring a pillow in place of bundled clothes.

For the disposal of waste, a trench tool and a certain amount of lye will suffice to ward off noxious vermin and disease. The spade I will purchase, the lye I can acquire without cash via an acquaintance.

These scarce debits considered, I come to sustenance, which is the primary concern of every life. Though in later years I may become a hermit in earnest, that life is not my current goal. There is a lake not far from where I will sleep, where I may get fish: if I choose this course, the rod and reel and tackle and necessary governmental licenses will cost perhaps seventy-five dollars. I do not think that I will plant much food (it is too late for potatoes) but still I may hoe a dozen rows to harvest cabbage and spinach and the other fruits of the cold months.

So how shall I eat? In short, my diet will be very simple. For my meals: rice and beans, or peanut butter, or bulk sugar, or vitamin-enriched protein powder. To supplement this, tablets containing ascorbic acid. If I can live on two dollars of food a day, with a ration of salt, then by mathematics I can live for a year on less than Eight Hundred Dollars- and what do the poor pay for their walls?

I will place my food stores in airtight plastic containers, and bury them in the ground.

As for books, will be sad to exile myself from the Library. With me I will take, at least, the Metamorphoses of Ovid (trans. Melville), The Aeneid of Virgil (t. Mandelbaum), the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer (t. Lattimore), The Divine Comedy (t. Longfellow), The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Notes From Underground, The Moon is Down, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. Small a library as it is, I will have to water-proof it.

Essential things are small and attainable. This more than any other thing I seek to demonstrate to myself. I know a number of nurses, doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, pharmacists, teachers- their compensation staggers me. Can a man really be fed for three months upon one day of their salary?

I want to live, and I can afford to live. I reach this economic moment by luck, favoritism, and kindness. It may be that I already have the answers to my questions, but I will need to hear the echo in order to believe.

Bukowski no. 7

When I woke this morning, the sky was pouring down rain.

I was not wearing a shirt, and I walked out my door

and down the stairs and the air growled one long time like a dreaming wolf.

All over my body, my hair stood up like I had a first shot of vodka

or saw a water moccasin, and for the duration of the thunder I was the storm;

electricity jolted across the surface of my skin and I felt everything.

Suddenly I begin shivering from the cold.

My apotheosis is incomplete-

the overflowing gutters are boring,

the clouds are not nearly dark enough,

even the touch of the rain is now like a woman who has stayed too long.

I walk up the stairs and into my door and dry off with a black towel.

Is it really three fucking hours until they open the bar?

A Profession

What do I do? I encage a spirit

In a space too small to lay down or stand,

And I give the prisoner cold poisons

Or else toxins to quicken its slow blood,

And from time to time I pierce through its skin

With pins or swords or flame-heated needles:

In tortured screams I find the art that was foretold.

A Painting

I told her once that I had a poetic ambition,

that one day I would write a still-life.

Each rind-tough pore of the orange,

the texture of the skull where eyelids would be,

the entrancing bulb of an opening flower…

coarse woodgrain on the table tells the story of rain

that did not fall one summer, the flower

is given to a woman taken before July by typhoid,

the skull is my own. There are no defects in the orange,

but I starved. I never learned to like the taste of citrus.

Rinne

After I die and am reborn anew-

Let me be a serpent with deadly lips,

A hatchling hawk that breathes through three slow days,

Or a clam tossed by waves upon dry land.

Make an inchworm, but never this again.

A Feather

Though you can be displeased with conclusions,
I urge you to accept wind that scours,
Crumbling stones, sand that digs until it blinds:

If, by chance, desolation is hated-
Noble friends, do not believe that my hands

Built this desert, nor that it will disappear;

If what has been shown is not beautiful,

I will give you trees on cold spring mornings

Blowing dry flame as kisses on the boughs-

Wrens die underneath the claws of housecats.

I become tall in dark, ruined landscapes.

An Echo

I have come to this peak to speak in anger.

Far above the land, a man may earn the attention of gods.

If I wished to simplify my grievance,

I suppose the universe was the beginning-

I cannibalize a few stars and make my blood,

I paraphrase a little.

I am disgusted by variance because it imitates the impossible:

it is a lie, wearing a face bold like the invaders that come over the sea

and leave shepherds to tend hilly stretches of rock for ten thousand dawns.

I despise this world for reasons that are mostly petty.

My rage consumes those around me but still

is almost nothing; oaks fall on windy days and on their leaves

the truth is inscribed, but the interpretation is lost

or else has been intentionally demolished.

Where then in this rubble dwells mighty works, or the fabled King of kings?

Where in these poisoned rivers are the Naiads splashing?

Nothing is fit for carrion here in the shadow of the mountain,

but do not worry your brave and circling heads, you vultures,

soon enough a meal can be made of Narcissus.

The Black Sea

The god seen when steel finishes a life,

The weaving threads that form a tapestry,

The woman starving on a desert isle;

The poet dies amid barbarians.

Threshing

Move your hands. Dry your eyes. You have earned pain.

You think that reapers spare a pretty face

Or care that grain did not fulfill its dreams?

Perfume from a Dress

The irretrievable always compels.

Paintbrushes transform life to memory;

Memories hang on cold museum walls.

The walls persist for archaeologists-

The gods of sand long ago claimed the rest.

Dust and time will soon dominate the earth.

Kiss me on these bones of ancient cities,

Kiss me now near this new moon, immortal,

Kiss me for hatred, or to frustrate doom.

Your beauty cannot be borne, even in darkness.

Dispel this madness, blindfold me with lust. Kiss me.