Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Bukowski

Well, I mean you know at the start it seemed
mostly living with whores in rundown apartments,
maybe in New Orleans and maybe elsewhere,
chopping garlic cloves and riding the bus,
confessional to a fault, words splayed on a page,
mostly alphabetical scattershot thrown at the wall
to see what sticks, but maybe you were howling like Alan
or riding a Coney Island mind, a Ferlinghetti whirligig,
a metronome ticking to the beat of a Beat
over and over again while drinking gin.

You could just as soon have written

about Vaseline hair or Thousand Island dressing

or some female French Quarter anatomy

wrapped in a kimono, and maybe you were

as free and loose as Mary Oliver,

only with a little heron acid trip thrown in

for some seasoning, word jambalaya on the bayou,

and in the end I guess it was kind of hip,

kind of cool with a standup bass

and poetry slams in a coffeehouse kind of way.


~William Hammett



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