I’m happy to announce that my first poetry collection, The Blackened Blues, is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s pocket; you can go directly to my publisher, Finishing Line Press, or support my pals (and 1455 partners) at D.C.’s The Potter’s House).
THE BLACKENED BLUES is part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of the author’s personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing these poems, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. This collection seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage.
I’d like to introduce the collection, one poem at a time (in the order they appear in the book), and tell a little bit about the inspiration for each, by way of explanation and in tribute.
First up is “Charles Bukowski’s Bounty” (and thanks again 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.
Charles Bukowski has long been an easy target, especially for the insufferable and self-appointed insiders of the literary scene. Sure, the macho posturing (although this dude at least knew how to throw—and receive—a punch, literally and better still, figuratively) is never a good look and looks worse the further it recedes in the rear-view mirror. And yes, the output, staggering as it is (listen, just the willingness to put the words down, day after day, separates the scribblers from the posers, the doers from the onanists with amazing networks who worry about everything except actually getting the work done), is hard to parse, and tends to separate readers into opposite camps: completists for whom too much is never enough, and the aforementioned prigs who would never sully their delicate sensibilities by reading any of his work, or admitting it’s any good.
The fact of the matter is, Bukowski’s fiction has aged quite nicely indeed; even surprisingly so, and everyone is of course welcome to pick and choose the poems of their liking, but even if his body of work consisted of a handful of poems (some beloved, others obscure), his legacy stands proudly alongside many, many academy-anointed lightweights (no need to name names, but suffice it to say, I find more joy and soul—and authenticity—in a single page of Bukowski than anything I’ve read by Jonathan Franzen).
Your mileage may vary, but listen to this and this and see if they make so much contemporary writing seem insular, technical, precise, derivative, and like another brick in the ivory tower that’s at once endless and two-inches tall.
It’s an enduring tribute to Bukowski’s genius that his writings continue to inform, inspire and console. It’s our collective tragedy, as human beings, that much of his subject matter remains relevant, applicable and therefore actively ignored. Then again, as William Carlos Williams declared, for all time: “It is difficult to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
Maybe Orwell and, to an even more depressing if prosaic level, Kafka, help elucidate what made 2016 seem, in hindsight, inevitable, they no longer serve as acceptable shorthand to handicap what neither politics nor cult worship can quite explain. How then to explain this straight-up nihilism, the antipathy it’s increasingly difficult to see us ameliorating anytime soon?
Check this out. To a certain, if somewhat understated degree, Bukowski countenanced this, predicted it, and articulated it, decades and decades ago. This poem predicts how Trump (and MAGA) happens, what happens when it happens, how it will keep happening, and how preventing it from happening (again) is what drives those with hearts and minds intact. And, in a particularly perilous moment, unites anyone who still believes in democracy, and freedom. And, not last or least, love.
The Genius of the Crowd
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art
