Exercising charlie

Poetry is what happens
when nothing else
can ~

Charles Bukowski

Charlie (Hank, Huck?) was right when he said

nothing else

is left.

But the space between words,

that’s the truest time -

soldered to a chair, port-induced

haze mingled with free-based elegies

and steep admissions.

they walked you today

out and across the bridal veil,

water tumbling like sheets of photo-chemicals,

all slick and deep and burning

You stroke the keys - like a gland for milk

and nothing but association to factions survive

you type and hope nothing’s left that isn’t yours -

even though they’ve all said it,

maybe you’ll follow Dylan to the grave – rigid with adoration and clogged with old, dead, poems.

do your slippages account for these gaps?

the little times bereft of ‘comfortable, clever poems’ maybe that’s all there ever was – hazy winter wanderings, padded and pandering declarations

and half-carved demi-gods – mortal and yet stained

can you construct this? Charlie wouldn’t ask a question like that, buried up in his room, candy wrappers and bottles and hate –

his dysfunction a fuel, his fucking an ode, his drink an answer.

he might not have seen it so…grandly. He wouldn’t have talked to you – but you don’t know that, at least

not tonight

Para-aortic

Star light on a ring of snow, two men, one imperceptibly shorter than the other, begin to dig a grave for a fallen clown.

It’s harder than they think, this clown being by now at this later stage, more jolly than perhaps is best given the circumstances.

They hunker down for a long dig and talk about the effects of green-house emissions on global warming and the rising price of fine salmon.

They’ll dig through to night to bury this half-remembered joker as close to the centre of the earth as they can get.

They plunge and punch and push his bloated frame deep into the warm earth as storms lash their fine bespoke suits, muddy now in the torrent.

But he won’t go down, not this way, not whole.

They’ll have to hack him up, slap and slice the fat from all around, like whittling lard to make an old toy soldier fit back in the box.

Once their done, what’s left of our Jester strewn in and around the cavity, they’ll lie on the wet grass in the burning morning air and light a cigarette to share.

They laugh at their ruined suits and the night’s wet fury but somehow they manage to eulogise their deceased and dismembered charge.

He’ll be remembered for that quick maudlin temper, his sweet rages and biting barbs, the purity of his joy and the harshness of his gaze – but he wont be coming back, at least not back through the earth.

Destiny and Irony will sleep well tonight.

hulk

your sweet absolution is not my drug of choice baby

nor do I desire the sugary sopor of release in quite the same description,

I find no solace in those tweaks and tricks of light -

the steady progression of your every enamored list sits nearly askew

on a teetering inadequacy of my divine comedy,

the errors I reel off accept my useless virtues -

render me infertile in this barren scribbled land,

I can not write in sand and nor on water shall I remembered be

for this is my decaying life and the husk you love is me.

1988 (Intermezzo)

grasping at the rough spillage of my tongue,

formative distinctions ache out their tense judicial instruction.

thought-pre-thought crushes out the loose bonds of steep association

and carves funeral niches for free descriptions and an allusion to soul -

so this and other inadequacies gain heat and fire,

as steaming deep conversations flitter away into the rambling street

to soak and re-remember Harlem days when nights caught fires unaware

and old dead Lorca grappled with his love and my iniquity

jungle orderlies

distant communications with steep

desire, I move orderlies to bring about

a quiet revolution, not that the

wheel’s shifted per se but at least

some subtle malfeasance crept into

our sad September hold-alls.

I engendered then at least two

passages in which settling nicely meant

giving up the core of all you

wished you’d fought for many long

Æneids ago. That brought freshly

forward sought nonchalance like bilious

deeper notions and I, in my tower,

glaring at the obfuscations and their

kin laughing in the dying jungle

know too much salary is part of

all the malady lain bare like ripe

plums pregnantly sombre in their

bursting skins, baring all the sun and sin.