Something Happened on the Way to Reading Bukowski

#1 Don't Peel The Grapes

Don't peel the grapes.

Just eat them.

That is what you do with Bukowski.

It is a sun and hamburger Saturday.

If I drank beer,

It'd be a beer and sun and hamburger Saturday.

My son throws a rock in the air.

It lands on my daughter's head.

She bleeds on top of my white tee.

She bleeds onto a wash cloth.

She cries.

Cries.

Cries.

I rock her until she feels better.

Put the culprit in time out,

make him apologize endless times.

These are what my Saturday afternoons are like.

Bukowski waits by the lawn chair.

I go back and eat him up.

He would have liked it that way.

#2 My Father Was A Poet

Bukowski could have been my father.

Had whores,

rolled joints,

smoked whole packs of cigarettes in a day,

stared out of his front porch in his underwear,

walked the streets of New York,

puked and took a shit at the same time.

Went to the races,

bet his pay check on horse number 4,

had so-called friends that would have raped

me or my sister given the chance.

Had a good wife that never did anyone any wrong.

Gave him his only children that we know of.

Remembered her in one or two his poems,

gave them to her as if they were written with his penis.

She has them stacked away

along with the lock of hair

his mother saved from when he was baby.

#3 The World According To Bukowski

I had to drink red wine in the middle of the afternoon

to write this poem.

According to Bukowski,

to write a good poem,

you must have:

1 - Several bad affairs.

2 - Been in love with a red haired girl.

And some other things not worth mentioning.

To be a good poet,

you need to jerk off a couple of times a day.

There is so much time in between

while you wait for that big one,

the one that gets put aside while

you contemplate the neighbor's cat

as it takes a shit by the fence.

Or while you wait for the next whore to knock on your door,

the postman to bring you another invite to a poetry reading,

just so some groupie can rush to the stage,

screams to do it to her right there and then.

How could one man be so lucky?

Throws up inside the strings of the University's only grand piano,

leaves knowing that someone will be writing about it long after he is dead.

Something like what I am doing now.

Something like what I never want to be.

Let me be lousy.

Let me be one of those housewives

that writes while drinking red wine in the afternoon.

I finish the expensive red in the cheap wine glass.