Bukowski no. 27

I worked all day today and I thought I would have something to say,
but after the indignity of the day I have nothing left.
I hope I will die soon.

Bukowski no. 26

Class is not what separates us. We are severed by the ability to hope. Why else should some live in dreams and others in nightmares? Surely we are not playing dice with our lives although it must seem so to an observer. They would look at me and say, “How coarse! He sleeps on a floor, he spends his money on drugs and sleeping pills and coffee, he does not even keep his knife sharp.” And they are not wrong, but they ignore the elemental truth and pain of it, the books that course through my veins like septic blood, the songs cascading fresh from choirs of fallen seraphim. We are all pure here, in the shadow of the moon.

Bukowski no. 25

She walks in forests with a knife on her hip
and lays a son to bed at night.
I fall asleep on the floor of my apartment
and spit out bloodied rotten shards of my teeth into the sink.

Once we were laying together and I looked at her
and brushed her hair away from her eyes and told her
that she would have everything she ever wanted.
She looked at me and told me that I would, too.

A History of Madness 9

The actions of man are as easily explained as the vagaries of the weather.
Any account of a moment or a life is necessarily colored
by the one who is aching out their remembrance so that we may understand.
Who benefits from these exchanges?
People are either capable of telling the truth or they are not.
We must believe that all the souls of humanity are not base liars,
But who among us has not recalled in detail a conversation that never took place
or a childhood summer spent on the shores of a lake that cannot be found on a map?
It may be that time is changing behind us, and that all our stories were once true.

Bukowski no. 24

She lifted her head off of my collarbone and said

“These are the days I could think I loved you.”

I shouldered her away and sat up in my bed

immodest as the day I was born.

Faint light clawed at the room from behind the blinds

and my legs shook up and down so that my heels bounced off the floor.

I focused on breathing: inhale four seconds, exhale eight-

I counted the tetrads as if I had learned meditation from a monk

and not an essay I skimmed over long ago.

I must have been looking toward the carpet for some time

but when I turned toward her she had not disappeared.

She was looking through me and I told her

she was something I could find in any book and

I was nothing she could not find in any other man and

I would have kept talking but she pressed her finger to my lips

and held me and quickly pretended to be asleep.

From the way her hips curved in the sickled moonlight

I could tell she was sorry to have said anything at all.

Throwing Up Blood in a Southern Town

Let us ignore the beginning and come to a day
when I showed up to work on time and worked for seven hours.

I came home to find that some of my countrymen had been murdered—
I could write this sentence every day and be truthful, and I think about this.

I went to the liquor store and I bought some.
I went back home and played video games for hours with my friends,
drinking a beer about every thirty minutes.
One of them went home and one of them went to sleep
and I had given three of my beers away and drank the rest
and I was out of weed so I didn’t feel like sleeping.

My friend’s girl had a bottle of some cheap white wine I would never buy,
and I sat waiting for the sun to come up and drank her Moscato
and afterward I opened the freezer and found the gin there
so I drank everything that was left in that bottle too.

The sun was up but I didn’t greet it or care much
and I was sitting in a corner narrowing my eyebrows at the world
and thinking about the last bottle of wine.

It was black wine
and I had bought it because the label looked like a metal album’s artwork
and it had a cork in it and the apartment’s corkscrew had broken a few days before
so I got a hammer and took the bottle onto the balcony.

I looked at my face’s reflection,
then put the bottle into a 2.5 gallon bucket.
I shielded my eyes with a towel and swung at the bottle as if it held my past

and I only knocked off the cork
and some of the upper curves were jagged like the mouth of hell
and I smiled.

I filtered the glass through my teeth and felt sorry for myself, or something.

I know that many things occurred afterward but the next that I recall
occurred in a bed and room that was not my own.
She leaned over me and said “You need to sleep, I’ll be back later”
and gave me a hug and she left and no one had been so close to me in months.

I spent hours there in my delirium, sweating out salt and poison,
trying my best to drink the ice water that sat on an end table an eternity away.

Suddenly I felt uncomfortable and raced to the bathroom,
vomiting water and salivary amylase and acid and bubbles
and eventually blood that looked like coffee grounds.
For the next four hours I tried to drink small bits of water,
only to reject it with the same bloody message each time.

Usually when you throw up blood people will insist on going to an emergency room,
and of course I should have gone, but I have never liked doctors much
and I did not think I would die on a Sunday so I managed to sleep through that morning
on the floor rather than one of those uncomfortable hospital beds.

This is not a poem and it is not much of a story and it does not have a point
and almost all of it happened to me because I didn’t care about myself
and I still don’t.

I carry all this pain around. I don’t even know why I have it. Other people have told me to give it away, as if it was money or a child I stopped caring about, but no one makes gifts of priceless things. No one else has ever tasted pain as exquisite as mine. When they pry my heart out they will be searching for diamonds.

The next day, after I stopped shivering, I cleaned off the hammer
and bought a corkscrew.