Imagine a nightmare
While you're awake.

Imagine a knife's edge
With a ghost at the hilt.

Imagine a death
Not instantaneous.

And then I realized-
I am not suffering.
The I is not constant.
The sick father, that is
Constant. The drawling
Pain of humanity, that
Is constant. Those of us,
The Bukowski's, are merely
Those conscious of the
Continuous and everlasting
Stream of human
Suffering.

I saw you in a Dream.
I was lying in the grass,
The panic filled my lungs
With a silent scream and my
Eyes with tectonic tremor.
You sat across from me.
I had never seen you before,
A gentle touch to my temples.
Perhaps it was the uncorrupted love
Of a beautiful stranger that
Made me ache for you when
I awoke. I know that I will
Never see you again.

It's the optimists that I can't bear
Chinese skin farms torture for a
Collection of innocent flesh and hair
Look on the brighter side of it, bud!
As your lie writhing in a stinking pile
Of naked muscle and pooling blood

The little girl whose teeth are smashed
Whose daddy has relapsed
And sold her as a piece of ***
To be ****** over and over for some cash
So that he can buy his ****** crack
And bleed his veins for a dwindled stash

The starving owl-eyed boy who
Believes himself evil for the thought of
Turning his little brother into his next meal
And not even a little left to steal
As ribcages tell a thousand tales
Along lines of skin and bone so frail

So **** your rhyme schemes
And your bleeding heart activists
Who scream in college courts
And completely lack the knack of it
Skin them alive and burn them as well
And maybe they'd have given their
Very souls to the fires of hell

They moved in back in 1956
New lovers, New breath, New life
A New house. Yellow and white shutters,
The lake in plain view, sloped lawn.
Children came forth, grew, left
Dandelion seeds on a wind's ride.
They planted a tree in the back
It grew as they shrunk. The wife died.
Dad can't stay on his own, we must
Find him a home. We're too busy, Susan
and Bill just had a baby. Put him on a shelf
In the closet. For sale sign comes up.
Old money young couple in a Black SUV.
The white shutters should be blue. The yellow
Is an off color. This tree in the back simply
Won't do. It blocks the view. It must come down.
Memories rot and rust and are painted over
The stain in the carpet where she spilled her wine
That one night when they had a little too
Much to drink, they fell into each others
Arms. Rip out the carpet.
The tree must come down.