the Dalaverse

All right, so it's the last day of April and I have actual poetry to post. Silex introduced us to Charles Bukowski and I was fairly meh on him until these two poems he shared with us for the last class today. The first one I mostly love for the last line, but it was the second one that really moved me. And poetry rarely does that to me. So, I thought I'd share.


consummation of grief


I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little

very little love is not so bad
or very little life

what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this

I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead



the soldier, his wife and the bum


I was a bum in San Francisco but once managed
to go to a symphony concert along with the well-
dressed people
and the music was good but something about the
audience was not
and something about the orchestra
and the conductors was
not,
although the building was fine and the
acoustics perfect
I preferred to listen to the music alone
on my radio
and afterwards I did go back to my room and I
turned on the radio but
then there was a pounding on the wall:
“SHUT THAT GOD-DAMNED THING OFF!”

there was a soldier in the next room
living with his wife
and he would soon be going over there to pro-
tect me from Hitler so
I snapped the radio off and then heard his
wife say, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
and the soldier said, “FUCK THAT GUY!”
which I thought was a very nice thing for him
to tell his wife to do.
of course,
she never did.

anyhow, I never went to another live concert
and that night I listened to the radio very
quietly, my ear pressed to the
speaker.

war has its price and peace never lasts and
millions of young men everywhere would die
and as I listened to the classical music I
heard them making love, desperately and
mournfully, through Shostakovich, Brahms,
Mozart, through crescendo and climax,
and through the shared
wall of our darkness.



I copied them exactly as they were laid out on the photocopies Silex gave us, so I dunno if that's correct.

Off to a barbeque at Church Point with some of the girls in the hall in about an hour. Could be good, could be weird. Me trying to be social is always a toss-up.