Easy Wind, Downy Flake

On rare occasion a poem will contain the qualities that make it as near to perfect as we can imagine. Feasible within a limitless set of themes and subject matter, if the poet’s heart and mind are turning in sync is it not then possible that the result will be a superior poem, whether one about trout fishing, refrigerator mechanics or the failure of love? Whatever the circumstances or subject matter, the quality of a poem will always depend upon the poet’s understanding of both his subject and his craft. Many will say that Robert Frost achieved this ‘near perfection’ in more than a few of his poems. And after all, it isn’t easy to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry with work that is less than superior.

On March 7, 1923 Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published in The New Republic magazine. It was Frost’s favorite of his own poems, and one he called ‘my best bid for remembrance.’ Though it is a poem about winter, Frost wrote the poem on a warm morning in the middle of June. On one occasion he said that it was the work of just a few minutes, almost without lifting his pen off the page. Describing the process he said, “It was as if I’d had a hallucination.” Despite the claim, an early draft of the poem shows clearly that it was reworked several times.

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Frost himself told the story this way: He wrote the poem based on an experience he had one Christmas season. At the time he was troubled that he and his wife wouldn’t be able to afford Christmas presents for the children. He wasn’t a successful farmer, but scrounged up some produce from their farm, hitched up his horse and took a wagon into town to try and sell enough produce to buy some gifts. He was unable to sell a single thing. As evening came it began to snow and he headed home. Along the way he was overwhelmed with the shame of telling his family about his failure, and as if sensing his mood, the horse stopped. Frost sat on his wagon in the falling snow and cried like a baby. Eventually, the horse jingled its bells, and Frost collected himself and continued the ride back home to his family. He later told his daughter: “A man has as much right as a woman to a good cry now and again. The snow gave me shelter; the horse understood and gave me the time.”

Returning to the idea of how Frost wrote the poem, a few minutes examination of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” reveals a work that defies any claim to quick, uninterrupted composition. As a contemplation on escape and responsibility, the poem is a combination of language, sound and rhythm in which words are like actors in a drama. In the technical sense, the poem is a series of rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter, sixteen lines divided into four lines with alternating rhymes. Taking the craft one step farther, Frost wrote each of the poem’s sixteen lines in precisely eight syllables. As example, look at the opening and closing lines:

Whose / woods / these / are / I / think / I / know

And / miles / to / go/ be / fore / I / sleep

Choose any of the poem’s sixteen lines and the syllable count will be eight. With everything else this is quite a feat. 

Poetry is writing that cries to be read aloud and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” couldn’t be a better example.

All I Could Drink

By his own admission, Raymond Carver more or less gave up writing at one point and took to full-time drinking. Working different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, he was drinking heavily by the age of thirty. Five years later, while an instructor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Carver recalled that it was less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. Leaving Iowa, the drinking continued for another three years. It was serious enough in 1977 for the writer to be hospitalized four different times for acute alcoholism. On June 2, 1977 with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous he stopped drinking and began a second life. That same year he received a National Book Award nomination for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please. He later said he would have died of alcoholism at the age of forty if he hadn’t found a way to stop drinking, often talking as if his second birthday were June 2, 1977. He conquered alcohol but died of lung cancer at the age of fifty.

Carver examined a great many themes in his poems and stories, but the grind of poverty, the collapse of love and the ruin of alcohol were prominent among them. The alcohol especially, and we get a glimpse of how early it began in his autobiographical poem “Luck.” The poem’s first appearance was in a 1979 issue of the literary magazine Kayak 50. It is included in Carver’s posthumous book, All of Us: The Collected Poems.

A boy wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents’ party…

LUCK

I was nine years old.

I had been around liquor

all my life. My friends

drank too, but they could handle it.

We’d take cigarettes, beer,

a couple of girls

and go out to the fort.

We’d act silly.

Sometimes you’d pretend

to pass out so the girls

could examine you.

They’d put their hands

down your pants while

you lay there trying

not to laugh, or else

they would lean back,

close their eyes, and

let you feel them all over.

Once at a party my dad

came to the back porch

to take a leak.

We could hear voices

over the record player

see people standing around

laughing and drinking.

When my dad finished

he zipped up, stared a while

at the starry sky—it was

always starry then

on summer nights—

and went back inside.

The girls had to go home.

I slept all night in the fort

with my best friend.

We kissed on the lips

and touched each other.

I saw the stars fade

toward morning.

I saw a woman sleeping

on our lawn.

I looked up her dress,

then I had a beer

and a cigarette.

Friends, I though this

was living.

Indoors, someone

had put out a cigarette

in a jar of mustard.

I had a straight shot

from the bottle, then

a drink of warm collins mix,

then another whisky.

And though I went from room

to room, no one was home.

What luck, I thought.

Years later,

I still wanted to give up

friends, love, starry skies,

for a house where no one

was home, no one coming back,

and all I could drink.

Donuts & Ethel Rosenberg

Another cold day in beachtown, just right for sitting at a sun-filled window with a good book. But before anything else I tested the air with a little outdoor breakfast in my big patio chair overlooking the blue. Enjoyed some time of wandering the beach near-stifled in the bulk of sweater, hoodie and scarf then returned to the warmth of indoors and a bright window of slanting light. I keep an ever-growing file on the iMac of poems that I like, and though not always the case, on many occasions poems discovered on The Writer’s Almanac end up on that list of favorites. Let no one doubt Garrison Keillor’s eye for poetry. For those unfamiliar with it, his introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times is a classic for anyone desiring an everyman’s approach to poetry. Should be required reading in classes starting with Poetry 101 and going right up to graduate seminars.

In my list of favorite poems from The Writer’s Almanac is one by Michael Heffernan, a fine example from a March 2011 edition of TWA. A Detroit native, Heffernan has taught since 1986 in the MFA writing program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. His ninth book of poetry, At the Bureau of Divine Music was published last March. Heffernan has won three NEA grants, and two Pushcarts, along with the Iowa Poetry Prize. This latest collection of poems combines meditations on the ordinary happenings of daily life with thoughts on the passing of years, on love and infidelity, and on remembrance and regret.

From that book, “The Art of Self-Defense” shows us the poet looking back to a time in his Detroit youth in 1953. The ending, which comes in six short, staccato-like sentences suggests that the thoughts, memories and feelings in the poem are crucial, possibly moments that shaped the poet’s growth.

THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

Another day’s stint in the free world
begins here in the donut shop. Standing in line
wondering how many cheese Danish and apple fritters
as well as donuts I should buy, while the creamy girls
in their summer dresses are licking their profiteroles,
I see myself as a boy in the summer of 1953
salting sliced tomatoes with my grandfather
in the white shirt he wore. The kitchen was big and sweet.
The breeze from the electric fan swung by us and away.
The oilcloth on the table was cool and slick.
The leaves of the tree of heaven dappled the sill.
In line in the donut shop is a man in a straw hat
between a woman in pigtails and a boy with large eyes.
Gramps was a boxer in his younger days, semiprofessional.
He watched the Wednesday night fights on our TV.
In his last autumn he taught me to box.
He set up punching bags in his basement.
He taped newspapers to the windows. He named me Spike.
He got me to shadowbox next to the coal bin.
He kept me at it hard till it felt like forever.
When the time came, he arranged a bout
with Mike Donnelly from down the street.
Mike struck the top of my head at once and down I came.
He helped me up from the floor and went home.
I was eleven. I wasn’t fast or clever. This was the autumn
after the summer they fried the Rosenbergs.
Gramps walked me down to the corner to get the Free Press.
The photograph showed their bodies on the front page.
He tugged my hand and kept me from seeing it.
We mark these solitudes throughout our lives.
This is not simply about things as they are.
This is about donuts, profiteroles, and straw hats.
Things cannot be as they are in this country.

The Places to Fish

Another of those rain drenched, wind whipped days at the beach which had all signs of a tropical storm but one that hasn’t excited the attention of meteorologists. As if operating on pulleys and guidelines, the same patio chair lifted off at some time in the night and flew in a beeline to smash again the same walkway light it crumpled one night earlier. Been trying to figure out how to explain that coincidence to the handyman charged with such repairs. Too much weather for venturing out of doors, so Saturday passed under the reading lamp with occasional breaks to stare out at the storm tossed ocean of mostly white froth, a thin band of gray-green below the murky horizon the only sight of unruffled water.

Maybe influenced by the weather, maybe not, but for a while in the afternoon an old book of Raymond Carver poems provided distraction from the noisy weather. I make the connection because a fair portion of the poems I read today have a dark underside that border on storms of another kind. On two earlier occasions I’ve posted poems by Carver, both times from the same book, All of Us. It is a posthumous collection arranged and edited by Tess Gallagher and first published in 1996 eight years after Carver’s death.

The poem titled, “In the Lobby of the Hotel del Mayo” Craver wrote in 1985 and speaks of an unexplained event or phenomenon that disturbs a bland and hot Sunday afternoon in a tropical hotel lobby. We are no wiser after the final two lines which describe more often than not the moments between humdrum and tragedy.

IN THE LOBBY OF THE HOTEL DEL MAYO

The girl in the lobby reading a leather-bound book.

The man in the lobby using a broom.

The boy in the lobby watering plants.

The desk clerk looking at his nails.

The woman in the lobby writing a letter.

The old man in the lobby sleeping in his chair.

The fan in the lobby revolving slowly overhead.

Another hot Sunday afternoon.

Suddenly, the girl lays her finger between the pages of

her book.

The man leans on his broom and looks.

The boy stops in his tracks.

The desk clerk raises his eyes and stares.

The woman quits writing.

The old man stirs and wakes up.

What is it?

Someone is running up from the harbor.

Someone who has the sun behind him.

Someone who is bare-chested.

Waving his arms.

It’s clear something terrible has happened.

The man is running straight for the hotel.

His lips are working themselves into a scream.

Everyone in the lobby will recall their terror.

Everyone will remember this moment for the rest of their lives.

The poem below is an earlier work from 1968, the poet’s years-later interpretation of the figure and face he sees in a photograph of his father.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FATHER IN HIS TWENTY-SECOND YEAR

October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen

I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.

Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string

of spiny yellow perch, in the other

a bottle of Carlsbad Beer.

In jeans and denim shirt, he leans

against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.

He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,

Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.

All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands

that limply offer the string of dead perch

and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,

yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,

and don’t even know the places to fish?

More of Raymond Carver here and here.

What Price Bananas

The 1956 publication of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” included a handful of other poems, among them one called “A Supermarket in California.” Written in 1955, this shorter poem, like “Howl” was also an experiment with the long line form which later became a Ginsberg trademark. A major influence in Allen Ginsberg’s life was Walt Whitman, and “A Supermarket in California” is in some ways an ode to Whitman. In more than one or two poems Ginsberg strove to find resonance with Whitman both style-wise and thematically. Like Whitman’s assaults on industrialized society and its encroachment on nature, there is much of the same in Ginsberg’s poem in a California supermarket. If not all, then most readers will be aware of the poem’s sexuality, something hard to miss with Ginsberg’s hand at imagery, but I will leave that for the reader to spy out. He starts by setting the scene: He is walking down an urban street, under trees and a full moon, having thoughts of Whitman, and pulled by two sides of life—the urban landmarks around him and the natural world of trees and moon. He enters a supermarket hoping to find beauty in the natural products there, hoping to see beyond the ‘commodities’ of modern society.

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,

for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees

with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went

into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families

shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives

in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you,

Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old

grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator

and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed

the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans

following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our

solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen

delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in

an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the

supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets?

The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses,

we’ll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love

past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,

what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry

and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat

disappear on the black waters of Lethe? —Berkeley, 1955

In Greek mythology Charon was the ferryman who carried the dead across the river Styx and into the underworld. The River Lethe was one more river in the underworld; drinking its water made one forget.

The photograph above was taken by William Burroughs in 1953 on the roof of Ginsberg’s Lower East Side apartment. Ginsberg was 27, publication of “Howl” three years off.

Crisp as Apples

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, Charles W. Pratt attended Phillips Exeter Academy for his high school years, and then returned there to teach in the 1960s. In the early 1980s he and his wife Joan bought an apple orchard in Brentwood, New Hampshire which they have operated ever since. His poetry has appeared in The American Scholar, Poetry, Commonweal and The Atlantic Monthly. “Prayer For the Small Engine Repair Man” is included in From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New and Selected Poems (2010), Pratt’s latest collection of poetry. Like the first bite of a freshly picked apple, there is something deliciously crisp about Pratt’s writing.

PRAYER FOR THE SMALL ENGINE REPAIRMAN

Our Sundays are given voice
By the small engine repairman,
Whose fingers, stubby and black,
Know our mowers and tractors,
Chainsaws, rototillers,
Each plug, gasket and valve
And all the vital fluids.
Thanks to him our lawns
Are even, our gardens vibrant,
Our maples pruned for swings,
The underbrush whacked away.
“What's broke can always be fixed
If I can find the parts,”
He says as he loosens a nut,
Exposes the carburetor,
Tinkers and tunes until
To the slightest pull on the cord
The engine at once concurs.
Let him come into our homes,
Let him discipline our children,
Console and counsel our mates,
Adjust the gap of our passions,
The mix of our humors: lay hands
On the small engine of our days.

A Dollar and a Half’s Worth

Philip Levine is what many describe as a poet of American urban working-class life. In much of his poetry is a voice that speaks simply, of simple things for those whose emotions and perhaps imaginations are restrained by a life of hard work. Librarian of Congress James Billington characterized the poet’s work as being ‘…about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.’ After studying at Wayne State University and the University of Iowa he worked at a string of factory jobs before starting to teach at colleges and universities. The 1991 collection, What Work Is won the National Book Award and the 1994 collection, The Simple Truth received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Mr Levine has published numerous collections of his work since 1963. Earlier this week he was named America’s Poet Laureate.

THE SIMPLE TRUTH

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,

took them home, boiled them in their jackets

and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.

Then I walked through the dried fields

on the edge of town. In middle June the light

hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,

and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds

were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers

squawking back and forth, the finches still darting

into the dusty light. The woman who sold me

the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone

out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses

praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables

at the road-side stand and urging me to taste

even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,

she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat” she said,

“Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”

Some things

you know all your life. They are so simple and true

they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,

they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,

the glass of water, the absence of light gathering

in the shadows of picture frames, they must be

naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965

before I went away, before he began to kill himself,

and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste

what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch

of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,

it stays in the back of your throat like a truth

you never uttered because the time was always wrong,

it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,

made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,

in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

Out to Pasture

HOMESTEADER

The ’37 Chevy pickup, retired to a rest

of rust and thistles, sloughed off its front

wheels—the better to munch the sod and

ruminate on great loads hauled: lumber,

a keg of nails, the tools and paint

for their first frame farmhouse, then

the bed, a castiron cookstove with its

clatter of pans, plus the barbwire and

feedbags, a pump…later, kids

and hogs and heifers to the county fair.

Lasting out the War to End All Wars, and

then Korea, she earned her ease, turned

out to pasture by the old woodlot, where

time and the weather wrought a work of art,

making her a monument to herself.

Born in Idaho in1926, John Haag was a member of the Merchant Marine during World War II and a naval veteran of the Korean conflict. He studied at the University of Washington and later as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Reading in Britain. After his study there he became a professor of English at Penn State University, where he taught for over thirty years. During that time he published three books of poetry: The Mirrored Man (1961), The Brine Breather (1971), and Stones Don’t Float: Poems Selected and New (1996). He died in Pennsylvania in 2008.

Wonderful the way Haag has brought the old truck to life through the lives and chores of a family over the years.

Lesbians Held Hands

More often than not a poem by Mary Jo Salter fails to hold my attention beyond a span of five or six lines, too frequently being a string of moments tied to the quotidian flow of domestic life. I suppose that criticism could be countered by someone pointing out that in my case, Charles Bukowski, a great favorite, also wrote volumes about unremarkable and seemingly mundane situations in life. In defense of that I would say that Salter is simply not the poet that Bukowski was. In Salter’s case there is sometimes the sense of attempting to weave television sets into lines of poetic meter while on another page casting a critical eye upon the already proven:

…give me Sondheim any day.

I’ve had my fill of Frost,

proud again to be lost,

coming upon his fork

in the road for the millionth time,

or stumbling upon woodpiles

of somebody else’s work.

—excerpt from “Out of the Woods” The Atlantic, October 2009

Certainly a writer is free to express opinion, observation or belief in any way that opens a chink of light for the reader, but it doesn’t always seem to work for Salter.

Salter was born in Michigan in 1954, received her BA from Harvard and an MA from Cambridge; was a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly and poetry editor of The New Republic before co-editing The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th and 5th editions. Salter’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review. She has spent extended periods of time living abroad, alternately in Japan, England, Italy, Iceland, and France. Currently a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, her sixth and latest collection of poems, A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems, was published in March 2008.

I thank The Writer’s Almanac for bringing to my attention a poem by Salter that I do like very much. In “Au Pair” a poem originally published in a 1999 collection and included in the more recent A Phone Call to the Future, the poet calls upon her experience of living abroad to paint a portrait of a French girl working as an au pair in American suburbia. Whether she means to or not, Salter shows us a fierce perspective of the American way. There is also a delightful sense of humor throughout. It might be that I connected with this poem because as a former expatriate most of the French girl’s observations about Americans and the American way of life mirror my own thoughts.

AU PAIR

The first thing she’d noticed, as they sat her down for lunch
by the picture window, was flags all doing a dance
in front of houses: was today a holiday?
No, they said smiling, it’s just the American way,
and she couldn’t help reflecting that in France
nobody needed reminding they were French,

but the neighborhood had turned out very nice,
no fences, big yards, kids racing back and forth;
you could let the shower run while you were soaping
or get ice from a giant refrigerator’s face.
She couldn’t believe how much the franc was worth
and she had no boyfriend yet, but she was hoping,

and because her father was the world’s best baker
she naturally thought of his bakery in the Alps
whenever they passed her a slice of their so-called bread,
and sometimes she wished she could hire a jet to take her
back just for breakfast, but as her great-aunt had said
so wisely more than once, it never helps

to make comparisons, so she mostly refrained.
She couldn’t believe, though, how here whenever it rained
the mother sent children out without their coats,
not carelessly, but because she had no power
and nobody made them finish the food on their plates
and bedtime was always bedtime plus an hour,

so au pairs were useless really, except for the driving.
Yes, that was puzzling: after she cracked up the car
they didn’t blame her or ask her to pay a thing,
but once she let Caitlin eat some sort of cherry
with red dye in it, and then the were angry, very.
Americans were strange, that much was clear:

no penmanship, and lesbians held hands
on the street, and most women carried a pair
of pumps in a bag they never took out to wear;
it was so disrespectful, she couldn’t understand
how the older ones got called nothing, not even Madame,
but then nobody in this country had a last name

which was going to make it hard to write them a letter
when she got back. It was really bittersweet
her visa running out; she was sad that all
she’d done with her days off was go to the mall,
she’d bought a million T-shirts and that was great
but she had to admit it, saving would have been better,

and she knew somehow that when she got on the plane
she’d probably never live anywhere foreign again
which filled her American family with more pity
than she felt for herself, because at least she was coping,
she’d work at her sister’s shop and stay in the city
where she had no boyfriend yet. But she was hoping.

Back to the Buk

Good reason that over five feet of bookshelf around here is taken up by the work of Charles Bukowski. More than any other poet the writing of Bukowski calls me back again and again. Of the over forty-five books of poetry, stories, letters, columns and novels that make up the published work, there are holes in my collection that I work slowly at remedying, always hoping that the next turn through a used bookstore will unveil a missing Bukowski. Meanwhile I read and reread his stuff without ever growing tired or less admiring of his easy lines.

Taking another look at the 2006 collection, Come on In!: New Poems, it was a different pair of poems that caught my attention this time. And that’s what I so enjoy about reading Bukowski; you just never know what line or which poem is going to find the perfect fit for the vagaries of the day and mood.

CUT-RATE DRUGSTORE: 4:30 P.M.

this woman at the counter ahead of me

was buying four pairs of panties:

yellow, pink, blue and orange.

the lady at the register kept picking up

the panties and

counting them:

one, two, three, four.

then she counted them again:

one, two, three, four.

Will there be anything else?

she asked the lady who was buying the

panties.

no, that’s it, she answered.

no cigarettes or anything?

no, that’s it.

the woman at the register

rang up the sale

collected the money

gave change

looked off into the distance

for a bit

and then she bent under the counter

and got a bag

and put the panties in this bag

one at a time—

first the blue pair, then the yellow,

then the orange, then the pink.

she looked at me next:

how are you doing today?

fair, I said.

is there anything else?

cigarettes?

all I want is what you see in front of

you.

I had hemorrhoid ointment

laxatives

and a box of paper clips.

she rang it up, took my money, made

change, bagged my things, handed them

to me.

have a nice day, she did not say.

and you too,

I said.

IN THE CLUBHOUSE

he is behind me,

talking to somebody:

“well, I like the 5 horse, he closed well last

time, I like a horse who can close.

but you know, you gotta kinda consider

the 4 and the 12.

the 4 needed his last race and look at

him, he’s reading 40-to-1 now.

the 12’s got a chance too.

and look at the 9, he looks really good,

really got a shine to his skin.

then too, you also gotta consider the 7…”

every now and then I consider murdering

somebody, it just flashes in my mind for a

moment, then I dismiss it and rightfully

so.

I considered murdering the man who

belonged to the voice I heard,

then I worked on dismissing the thought.

and to make sure, I changed my seat,

I moved far down to my left,

I found a seat between a woman wearing a

sun shade and a young man violently

chewing on a mouthful of

gum.

then I felt

better.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) was born in Germany of a German mother and American father. Except for some cross country roaming in his early years, he lived his whole life in Los Angeles. His poetry focuses on the ordinary life of average people, women, alcohol, writing and the drudgery of low level employment. In an interview he once said: “You have a picture of where you are…Since I was raised in L.A., I’ve always had the geographical and spiritual feeling of being here. I’ve had time to learn this city. I can’t see any other place than L.A.”

For more Bukowski look here, here and here.