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NO ONE HAD THE TIME to see the face
of the black man in the black suite from the back room.
He handed an envelope to the clerk
and disappeared before he was seen.
Later people said his eyes were black
his skin was black "and not brown" said
the little child.
In the envelope his request:
100,000 dead children.
His merchandise:
two more years of oxygen.
––––––––
THE NEW BUKOWSKI
browsing through the poems
it all makes sense
the rejections, my wife's screams
my children driving me crazy
in a few lines
he makes sense of it all
7 years after Buk's dead
John Martin promises more volumes of poetry
this is his fourth posthumous
352 pages, for many poets
this is the collected poems book
I have this idea that Buk
was not only a great poet
he was the greatest computer man on earth
and set up a program that when pushing enter
gives you a complete poetry book
we have the Fante poems, the races poems
the women, and the flies, the 3 A.M. poems
the father the mother poems
all his books like a novel
from childhood till death
I read a review of Bukowski in which the reviewer
attacked the readers, I read it twice to be sure
I hadn't got it wrong. Her thesis was
that since Buk was in a fascist group in college
(and yes he was for a few months
just, as he says, because he hated the left)
everyone who likes his poetry should ask himself
why he likes it
(meaning he may be a hidden fascist too).
You fooled them all, you mad bastard
you are still fooling them
they are angry that people, real people
read your poems
instead of reading their university stuff
and there will be more and more books
after your death to keep them mad
at you, they will say these are recycled poems
you like a Cezanne painting again and again the same mountain
but some of us know you were and you are
poetry's only hope, poetry's only way
of not being lies in beautiful words
in complex lines and in frozen books.