New Roses

In bars,
Factories,
Forgotten villages;
Through rain,
Wind,
Snow;
Standing at stoplights;
Or going from car to car,
Trying not to get hit,
I have hustled many roses
Down the avenues of the dead.

I sold my roses to young men,
Who gave them to their sweethearts;
I sold my roses to married men,
Who handed them to prostitutes;
I sold my roses to little girls,
Who presented them to their mothers.

Sometimes the dead were gracious and thanked me for my roses;
More often they were hostile,
Or the roses themselves perished,
And joined them.
The blood of the dead
Reddened my roses;
Their thorns
Pierced the living.
I kept up the hustle.

I used to sell my roses for God.
I have new roses now,
But no God to sell them for;
I park them in a cheap corner of the market,
And wait.


“I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.”
Charles Bukowski, Consummation of Grief

For the Aliens

This one’s for the aliens,
So far away,
Who have so few poems written about them,
Though I’d like to think that they’d be cultured enough
To appreciate it
If we bothered.
So far away
That we can probably never reach them,
Nor they us;
But we can think of each other,
Like sailors on different oceans whose routes never cross.
Perhaps the aliens have more of a handle on it all,
Or at least some of them do,
Since there must be billions of races of them,
Unless none at all,
In which case,
They will not be wondering about our poems.
We can still wonder about theirs though,
Because they’re that far away
That the ones they haven’t written
Are just as interesting as the ones they have.

God Who Cannot Be

A God dwells within me—
The God who cannot be.
He offers no eternal life
But only a palpable sense
Of solidarity with all people,
All conscious beings.
He watches over my shoulder,
The God who cannot be;
He knows my inmost dreams.
He is imagination,
Like steel and rock,
But He cheers me on,
And gives me wisdom,
Assurance,
Grace,
Sometimes correction too.
Here he is,
The God who cannot be,
Ignoring all evidence to the contrary—
Not even offended by it.
He is unmoved,
Unaffected even by His own nonexistence;
He has no inclination help my unbelief,
Or otherwise cross my palm with silver.
We wait it out:
Me here,
Him here—
God who cannot be,
Till death us do part,
In preposterous equilibrium.

The Young Man’s Reply

Dear Will, these pretty sonnets that you sent
Were ordered and created all in vain;
I’m of a downcast, melancholy bent—
All thoughts of procreation I disdain.
Though some do say I’m blessed with looks and wit,
The dullest blade might bear a burnished hilt;
Within me, there’s a gloom I can’t remit,
That swamps the praise of those who prize mere gilt.
I’ll not supply another girl or boy
To brave life’s ceaseless turmoils and deceits,
To struggle in a world I don’t enjoy,
Whose fruits are shallow triumphs, deep defeats.
Let’s leave the risks and toils of screeching birth
To those more prone to nurture hope and mirth.

Children of Darkness, Children of Light

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Children of one cryptic womb;
Dancing together,
Concealing the spite,
Furtively watching the room.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Glances won’t tell who is who;
Follow the fiddle,
And have some more wine,
Everyone’s looking at you.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Waltzing in endless dispute:
Which is the parasite,
Virtue or guile?
The benefactor or the brute?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Everyone toeing the line.
How will the balance
Be broken at last?
Will it be chance or design?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Speaking their piece to the court:
Light gets the blessing
And solemn acclaim,
But darkness wins all the support.

Knock Me Down With a Feather

You could knock me back down with a feather,
Or shrivel me up with a glance;
I feel a bit under the weather,
But people still want me to dance.
So, just let me know what your wish is,
Enough with the hullabaloo;
Or send me to sleep with the fishes,
I really don’t mind if I do.

Just grind me to dust with your pestle,
Then blow me away with one breath,
Or lead me where rattlesnakes nestle,
Below in the valley of death.
I haven’t a reason for crowing,
Or even a wing for my prayer;
Today, I don’t know where I’m going,
Tomorrow, I won’t even care.

My body is clumsy, not agile,
My mind gets more spongy, less crisp;
The life that we lead is so fragile,
We waft in the will-o'-the-wisp.
But though I’m all hat and no cattle,
I do what I can, by and large,
So, prop me back up for the battle:
The enemy’s ready to charge.

Corridors

Corridors are tunnels
That we build above the ground,
Between the present and the future,
The known and the unknown.
Corridors are rooms to which Time has been added:
They must be passed through, endured.
In dreams, we find ourselves inside them,
Panicked;
Running against the clock;
Trapped between the observable and the hidden;
Bewildered by constantly shifting connections,
While striving desperately to reach some crucial goal.
Time is always of the essence—
Time that lurks in corridors,
Clutching its silver baseball bat.

Awakened,
We have clocks to remind us
That we are late for something,
But not what we are late for.
The second hands move too fast for us;
The hours too slow.
The satanic, black minute hand is the worst,
With its tantalizing, almost perceptible movements,
Which seem to say that Time is barely out of our grasp,
Like water in a nightmare of thirst.
The brutal Time that persecutes us in our dreams
Is the deranged henchman
Of this dull time that regulates
The monotonous tick-tock of our days.

Yes, all clocks say only one thing:
“You are late!”
But there’s ultimately nothing to be late for,
Except the clock itself,
With its circular reasoning.
The Earth turns and makes its way around the Sun:
There is no late in Astronomy.
Clocks lie to us.
What tyrannizes us is not Nature’s time but civilization’s.

Another dream.
Now we are in a mineshaft—
A different kind of corridor.
We trudge into pitch black,
Toward gold, or disaster.
We see a light:
Is it daylight,
Or something massive hurtling toward us?
What we really want it to be is a lantern,
Swung by a friend.
Miners withstand corridors far worse than ours.
Why is it that they do not all go mad?
Camaraderie.
Brotherhood.
Fellowship.
Those who walk gentler corridors—
The air-conditioned, well-lit, antiseptic
Corridors of power—
Lose their minds quite often,
For want of the same.

Corridors are rooms
In Halloween dress up.
Are we going to let them frighten us,
Or are we going to party?