bukowski
lycanthrope
If I still drank I'd raise a well whiskey
to Chuck of the rotten breath
and gravelly thoughts.
It's fashionable to shit on him
if you're amongst the literary bores
who make unironic land acknowledgements.
We are standing on the unceded
and ancestral lands of the sauropods
and so on.
As if they're going to give it back,
as if the land gives a shit.

And so maybe he wrote about women
as if he only barely made out
their shape as objects in dimly lit bars.
He seemed to make his own shape
out in similar fashion.
Was he the poet laureate of incels
when we just called them drunks
and losers?
Sure but it seems now there are worse
things than the edgelords
carrying dogeared copies of chapbooks
and eventually finding Emily Dickinson
in the hope of being set free.
Maybe communing with the old gods
of anger, despair, and honest loneliness
in words - in the hope of finding some
beauty in the rot of one's soul
is preferable to looksmaxing
and pickup artists
and podcast bros.
Maybe giving grace to hamfisted despair
is a better approach
than the delusion that the world owes
you a god damned thing.
Maybe you are actually ugly and unloved.
It won't stop you from writing a poem.
And if I'm being honest,
poems and whiskey have their own
sexual currency
if you're into that sort of thing.

If you're lonely, pick up a book of his poems.
Chirp a bit at the bluebird in your soul.
Give people the grace to lash out
in the places it's allowed -
bars and open mic poetry nights.
And give yourself grace if you're odd
and unloved and navigating
the long open mic poetry night of the soul.
After all, look around you
at the utter hell the so-called sane and virtuous people
have fashioned for us.
Get angry, don't let them win,
don't let the hucksters sell
you on self improvement.
Poetry is and always has been
the only thing that's free in this country.

You won't catch me hiding his books
when polite company comes over.
And when no one is around,
and it's late at night
and my wife and the memories
of my ex-girlfriends are asleep
I sometimes still read them. 		260326
what's it to you?
who go 		blather
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