Chinaski, Chinaski come over here
God Chinaski you stink of beer
Your late again and your work is slow
I should write you up, one more and they will let you go

Chinaski thinks to himself you'll see, I will not conform to who you think I should be
You can stuff your job, the pay is lousy anyway
I have better ways to pass my days

Down to the civic Chinaski did trot
They wrote up his resignation and cut him a cheque
Chinaski took it with great cheer walked down the road and bought a couple bottles of wine and a fifth of ***** and a six pack of beer

He got in his car and off to the track to blow the lot on some halfpenny nag
And to pick up a lady to befriend, maybe get lucky and back to mine, where we can share some bottles of wine

If not so lucky then that's fine by me, I'll get drunk and write my short stories
There's been one constant in my life, longer even than I was married to my wife
That's my typewriter it's special you see
It follows me from room to room, cheers me up when I feel gloom
I put the paper in and turn the carriage and start to write of love and marriage of growing up and moving out, of fights and bars and women and cars.

I write of being on the street of all the women that I meet
I write of work and racing, I write of hardship that I'm facing

I write of the tough life I've had but I don't write it for you to be sad
I write to make you smile and laugh
I write because it helps you see, I write it to cleanse me

If I make you happy along the way then well what really is there left to say

Have a good day, have a Chinaski day

the phone rang at 1:30 a.m.
  and it was a man from Denver:
  
   "Chinaski, you got a following in
  Denver..."
    "yeah?"
   "yeah, I got a magazine and I want some
  poems from you..."
    "*******, CHINASKI!" I heard a voice
  in the background...
   "I see you have a friend,"
  I said.
   "yeah," he answered, "now, I want
  six poems..."
    "CHINASKI *****! CHINASKI'S A *****!"
  I heard the other
  voice.
    "you fellows been drinking?"
  I asked.
    "so what?" he answered. "you drink."
    "that's true..."
   "CHINASKI'S AN *******!"
    then
  the editor of the magazine gave me the
  address and I copied it down on the back
  of an envelope.
    "send us some poems now..."
    "I'll see what I can do..."
   "CHINASKI WRITES ****!"
   "goodbye," I said.
   "goodbye," said the
  editor.
    I hung up.
    there are certainly any number of lonely
  people without much to do with
  their nights.

Chinaski licked his tongue over the opening of the whiskey bottle, knowing that it wouldn't stop me but he knew it would delay the use for someone else. He kept repeating his poem "she is dark. she is dark. she is reading about god. i am god." and the whiskey label suddenly turned into a lullaby, the only thing able to keep me under water and i heard it with blurry vision. she is dark. i am dark. i am reading about god. he is god. he is blood alcohol content whispering numbers too high for decimals, hoping i'd be my whole self tonight. waking up fractions of a second too close to consistent unconscious, wondering if i could even make it home with muscles meant for the sea floor. I have no legs when i am around him, and He as in Liquor, as in The Only Thing Keeping Me Up Right, The Only Thing Keeping Me Above Ground. I am sinking, slipping under waves crashing over my lungs like the wrong pipe. But he promises he's got the right one, Chinaski blowing O's over my bed frame. He is dark. I am dark. We are reading about God. He is God. Asking where is God? We are sullen prayer folding over the pew, removing shoes to show how raw we are, or are we removing soul? I've got no time to play in the second coming, Chinaski drowning himself in women promising their second coming, I've never admired him. Or Him, making hymn out of moans, telling everyone i am dark. i am dark. i should be reading about god, he is god. I never knew god. I don't know how to read a book considered fiction, running my tongue up the necks of the sacrilegious whimpering out Christ's name like he will know how to sacrifice the hands that tame the unholy. I pray he will learn to split time or bible, explaining truth from love. Chinaski never loved more than once, and that was with the glass in his hand and full gut of scotch. I am dark. I am Chinaski. I am reading about God. He is God.

Hi
I'm 26
I have a really pretty face and thick legs
I've read all your books
And not that you'd care
You're dead
I don't want to *******
But I want you to know
That nothing makes me feel
Worse for someone
Than when they act
Like nothing's wrong
And I think
That's partially your fault.

They may call you fatty,
scruffy and ugly.
Your name may be vile
and I bet you smell awfully
smokes and ***** and
cheap perfumes of many different
******.
But when I look through you
when I see beyond this fog
and almost feel you inside
I know then
you beat the handsome beasts
you beat them all
with the ruin of your heart that you keep
in the drawer of your bedside table
where you pop off beside
now and then.
And it's usually a.m.
It's always a.m.
Just like now
as another night on earth covers us both
as you wish to be a cat in your next life
as the street-lamp peeps into our loneliness
I raise another glass full of youth and despair.
Toast to you, to me.
To the world who never treats some of his guests nicely.
So
I choose writing.
"it keeps the walls
from
failing.”
I need the sound of the words
making love with the typewriter.
But I make do with a pen and paper.
I know you own a typewriter.
My time,
must be a bit shopworn
Have you ever smiled by doing a bracket after a colon?
Guess nineteen ninety-four was a bad year to be born.
but a nice one to die.
Though congratulations
you did well at the computers
well enough, like everything else
You take things as they come
and life teaches you how to get used to them.
You get used to living, you get closer to death.
It is not a big deal, has never been.
But it is the only deal.
A deal we can't deny.

All I wanted to say was a
"happy birthday"
but not that happy.

@mosquito

"There is always one woman
to save you from another
and as that woman saves you
she makes ready to destroy"

Chinaski taught me that

when I was still in
high school and looking for
answers in poetry books.

I managed to find few and
far between in those four years.

Then I became a college
student and my hunt turned
to the wilderness of
crowded bars, living room floors
and enough pills to
swim through
only to drown in the deep end.

I caught my breath in three years
and surfaced to a job I hated
in a town I loathed
but always called
home.

I kept my company but they
never sought to keep me
or so I tell myself.

Really I used every last drop
of them I could get
before the next one rode along
because of what Chinaski told me.

But this one won't ride along again
and I fear the day she does
because
Chinaski might be wrong.

I have just spent one-hour-and-a-half
handicapping tomorrow's
card.
when am I going to get at the poems?
well, they'll just have to wait
they'll have to warm their feet in the
anteroom
where they'll sit gossiping about
me.
"this Chinaski, doesn't he realize that
without us he would have long ago
gone mad, been dead?"
"he knows, but he thinks he can keep
us at his beck and call!"
"he's an ingrate!"
"let's give him writer's block!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
the little poems kick up their heels
and laugh.
then the biggest one gets up and
walks toward the door.
"hey, where are you going?" he is
asked.
"somewhere where I am
appreciated."
then, he
and the others
vanish.
I open a beer, sit down at the
machine and nothing
happens.
like now.
from the 1997 Black Sparrow New Year's greeting, "A New War"

“Mom, I’m not an idiot.”
She had been off her meds,
I could swear it.
The same nagging voice
As if I was a child,
“Jonathan David, I give you
money and the first thing
you buy is *****?”

What did she want,
An informal letter of my condition?

I apologized for having
a father as a drunk,
And a mother that took
more pills than she could stomach.

She hung up,
And I took another drink.

I've never read poems by other poets the way I read Bukowski's poetry
His legacy feeds my intense hunger for something other than what I know

And

It is worth my dollar
to learn more of what he thought
about the rigmarole of life, humans and ***.

Chinaski whispers to me

"Never try, never try"

I'm hanging limp on these words,
dangling before such expression

But it's Bandini that has me
breathless and freshly dead,
when he speaks in my head

"You are nobody, and I might
have been somebody, and the
road to each of us is love.”