bad poem 7: bukowski

[achilles]

BUK

yeah, he was a boozer and a womanizer
he'd sit on stage with a small fridge filled
with beer and he'd challenge the audience
to fistfights

the great bukowski
the furnished room poet
poet of poor slobs
poet for whores and pimps
thieves and tough guys

eventually bukowski got known
and has a slew of books published

ended up marrying some woman
and buying himself a bmw

he had faults like all of us

the thing is he offered hope to those
of us born into poverty or those of us
unable to play the game or be reliable
those of us who stay up all night
and don't go to work
don't want to work empty jobs
and see through it all

there's that great passage of his that
says if you stick to the writing long enough
if you give your entire body and soul to it
you will lose everything, family, wives,
children, friends, but you will, without a doubt,
commune with the gods

ache
2/15/10

[GodModule]

I love this poem.

the thing is he offered hope to those
of us born into poverty or those of us
unable to play the game or be reliable
those of us who stay up all night
and don't go to work
don't want to work empty jobs
and see through it all

There's nights when I'm sitting at home all alone, my head drunk with beer and sadness and not knowing what the hell I'm gonna do about tomorrow, when Charles Bukowski is the only thing that keeps me sane. God bless his beerdrunk soul.

[achilles]

amen to that, brother

[hester_prynne]

I used to not like him at all. Probably because I knew he was likely my best muse.
(He would like the way I said that. He was amused with people who didn't want to believe the score)

"What matters most is how well you walk through the fire."
He got that right.

Love this poem too!
BravoLa!
H

[achilles]

DESIGN

it seems he'd lost the design of things
the very shape of things around him
mostly it was the way the day might have design
how the streets would lead to a store or to a park
or the ocean or actually to any place at all
without design the streets led nowhere
and it was how the hours were designed
how he could ride a single emotion for an
entire day, whether joy or pain or desire
but when the design was lost
even for a while
all his miseries came out and strangled him
in a chaos, a void, completely undesigned
the way cancer cells develop
amorphous, ugly, demonic growths
with no artist whatsoever who designed them
it was clear to him, itself a design, that cancer
was the complete lack of art which was the
essence of design
and the artist the designer
so devoid of design life could become
that he became a poet for lack of any
other resource so that he could create, impose
a design on an empty, chaotic place
today was without design
and that's the point
for three years he'd stop at his woman's shop
just to see her, to say hello, but also to look
at the women who had their hair done, women
so concerned with beauty, at least its physical
form, and so often their notions were ridiculous
but he still appreciated these efforts
and his own woman, a beautician, an aesthetician,
my god, how lovely could that be
a designer by her trade
well, no matter, now he was an outcast from the shop
the place where common people went in droves for
art, to make their own bodies canvasses, to tell their
woes, their love secrets, their gripes, their prejudices,
miseries, stupidities, and he'd get it all second hand,
better no designing hand at all, from his woman
so, as i'm saying, today is without design
no shop for him anymore
only the cat
only the computer screen
a strange poem from a friend he's met maybe three
times in an entire lifetime
but that's a design also
the design of rarity, of words, of soul given in words,
poems, literature rather than life, or as hitchcock said,
good movies tell life without the boring parts
this too a design


achilles
2/19/10

[mtmynd]

good read... both of them.

ty