Bukowski no. 37

I thought that her eyes were very lovely,
like the color of malachite before it was worn smooth with time or water.
We were sitting on a ragged leather couch
that might have been expensive once,
and she had done her eye makeup
in that dramatic variation of Cleopatra Philopator’s style
that had inexplicably been resurrected back into fashion,
and her shirt was tight on her shoulders and cleaved low beneath the neck
as is always in fashion.

I sat there barely making eye contact.
Although I had been invited I had no idea why I was there.
I guess she was looking for the same thing as anyone else.
I did not ask her what she or other people wanted.
She sloppily poured gin and it was sliding down her throat and her wrist
and she was talking about some cruel things that someone had said about her
and because her hand was on my knee
I realized that she expected me to listen to her
so I sat there and she said

“She said I was an alcoholic, and that I don’t have my shit together, and that I was a fucking whore, and that I was terrible at my job!”
-and then she went on and on but it was the same sort of complaint only at greater length  and I noticed that her carpet was very clean but that her baseboards were in a state of terrible disrepair perhaps brought on by the scratching of domestic animals, and then she stopped talking.

I looked at her and she looked at me unhappily so I shook my head slowly
and it seemed like she expected me to say something so I said
“I thought you made really good money at work”
which was probably the right thing to say
because five minutes later her mouth was on my cock.
I had a hell of a good time for a little while but of course then she went to sleep
and she did not have any books
and I was not tired so I started drinking the rest of the gin she’d left out
and after I found the unopened bottle of Beefeater under the bathroom sink
I drank that too.