I like to drink
These little 2 oz plastic bottles
Of Fireball
That way you don’t need a single glass all night, or
Plastic cup. Or, whatever you like
And you can
Throw the damn things across the room
Each time you’re finished
Let them hit the drywall with a pathetic baby thud
And fall to the carpet
Not like a full bottle of whiskey
That shatters in the movies
You can
Pick them up in the morning
If you feel like it
Or, next year
Right before you have a visitor.

Always,
Writing the end of the
Sentence, on the next
Line. Like Bukowski
Did.
Well, he hated life and only liked
Being depressed -- like it was romantic to be
Defeated at birth
But,
I still love the way he
Said things. He was right,
Mostly.
But, now I’m getting sick of writing the end of the sentence on the next, line

Why do that?
Is it the rhythm?
Making the reader pause before the punch?
As if your wise…making profundity out of nothing?
Even he
Couldn’t make a poem unpretentious.
Especially wrong
About love -
Bukowski was-
And God, and mowing the grass.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Where is he now? Rotten flesh?

No
He was wrong about that too.
He exists for real
In me -- sure as rocks in the river.
Didn’t he ever wonder
About that?
Or why -
A cell has a plasma membrane, true
And atoms add up and down somewhere, true
Yet, that girls’ eyes really did
Move him inside?
Like a planet and a moon.
It wasn’t just cynicism and an electron
Shifting in there, and why…

Could he bring me to tears with
Wit alone?
Didn’t he wonder?
About that? He knew he could do it so easily.
Like a game, he knew,

I want to shake him now,
In his dumb grave
Wake up! look at that 4 year old
Again. Look again!
You could have been Plato!
She is trying to give you a bug!
Asking you how she will see you
In heaven!
How will she find you?
If it’s all white and bright up there?
Well, how will she see You? In heaven? She wants to know!
Didn’t you hear her
correctly?
Answer her!
Don’t you know the answer! Bukowski!
Answer her! Answer Me!

Awe, fuck it, then,
Fine, have it your way.
These fireball plastic 2 oz bottles fly
Across the room so
Good.
Pick them up next year.
If I have a visitor.
Don’t even have to patch the drywall.