April, according to this poet, is the cruelest month.
April, according to these lovers of poetry, is National Poetry Month, and the only cruelty is metaphorical (which isn’t to say T.S. Eliot was being literal except, well…)
In honor of this month, and since I don’t post on my blog as much these days, I’ll (re)share some of my published poetry. And that begs the question, if a poem falls in the Internet and no one reads it, is it still poetry?
Of course it is.
Poem #5: Charles Bukowski’s Bounty (thanks to Linden Avenue for publishing this one in 2017).
You could write a poem about this:
That was the story of his life.
The story of his stories, something more
authentic than life, which is what Art can be.
Failure a half-empty amphitheater where ideas are born.
Anyone can orchestrate chaos but it takes guts
to own it, even if you can’t describe or explain it.
Between spilled beers and bruised hands there’s a question:
What kind of world would you create, even if you couldn’t?
Take that mattress, out in the street, second-hand
salvation for those disinclined to inquire, but unafraid
to inherit; in this part of town everyone knows shit
You throw into a dumpster doesn’t go there to die.
There’s always someone hungrier or less happy, someone
who will not go quietly into that precarious night,
grateful to have the things you no longer need.
The women were not unlike the poems and stories,
they were the gold you spun from the machine we call
Misfortune, or being brave enough to figure out you own time
even when you can’t make money; money and time own you
Unless you flip the script, sucking & fucking the sweetness
Life lets you steal when it’s looking the other way.
Content to sleep or screw or imagine better realities, lying
on a sullied mattress, unworried by their stains or the untruths
they could tell, contaminating you in unintended ways, because
we share everything anyhow, the ugliness most of all.
And miserable men become mice scurrying away from that evidence,
scared to reconcile the ways we made these fictions of ourselves
in our own likeness way before the world ever got involved.
And that’s why well-fed and wordless sheep pace silently inside
extravagant pens, erected to secure them from all the surprises
cops and cars and banks and bibles can’t protect or serve.
Or prevent the moon from sweet-talking the tides to turn or
the sun, setting without comment over shallow graves dug
With dirty fingernails, bleeding insolently onto dry-cleaned
suits: symphonies of all the seconds and cents spent, hoping
to hide the sick and satisfied smile of a Universe that will throw
all of us, ultimately, into immaculate recycling bins where,
once we die, starving saints turn us into stories and poems.
