Back to Zero City Poetry Page.
fascinated,
I watched Barfly,
the movie about the young
CHARLES BUKOWSKI,
living in his underwear
in SQUALID cockroach-
infested rooms,
or sleeping IT off
in the gutter
or behind some damn
dumpster, DRUNK all
the time; writing stories
& poetic murmurings
when he could see
LONG enough
through the clouds
of
this WRETCHED existence.
& I wondered as I watched
how anyone could
live
like that, in the world BUT
NOT, bruised & coughing,
underfed, smoking,
drunk ALL the time.
how could anyone live
like that & still be
such a great
poet?
after the movie
I found
myself
rummaging through the PANTRY
hoping to find
an overlooked bottle
of WINE
or some cooking
sherry.
Bill’s a good plastics engineer who wants to try his hand at selling so I
give him the job and on our very first sales call together we run into Nancy,
the young, ambitious manager of the contamination control lab at IBM, and
she’s angry as hell because the 2 pieces of our Teflon filter housing simply
don’t fit together. So Bill sticks them into the freezer because Teflon
shrinks when it’s cold, then I watch (not knowing what else to do) as he
stands there under the fume hood in his new 3-piece suit trying to shove,
jimmy and squeeze the 2 pieces together, but of course they won’t go. So he
asks her for a rubber mallet and as she’s stomping off down the hall to find
one he becomes frantic, the sweat dripping off his forehead. “What should I
do? What should I do?” he hisses at me. And all I can think to say is,
"Bill I never noticed this before but you don’t have much of a chin."
when I woke
this morning I was
surprised
to see
my wife
looked like
Peter Sellers.
maybe it was the
way
her nose
came out
from her face,
or
the way her hair
lay flat
against the side of her head,
or
maybe
it was because
the light was
so dim.
I'm not certain,
but
I was worried
because
I know Peter Sellers
is
dead.
Back to Zero City Poetry Page.