We're told to look here ---------------> .
Meanwhile {this} is happening
& the media says (insert 'official' story here)
& repeats repeats repeats
a thousand times
until we're all singing
karaoke

                   *

or you decide to wake up.

If I somehow
***** this up, and die
in some stupid, boring, clichéed,
romantically tragic way
while I'm still sort of
young and
sort of attractive, and
you are, too,
I hope you
**** on my grave,
howl profanity at the couldn't-give-a-**** sky,
and curse me inside-out
for being
so derivative and
predictable.

It's been a dark and ***** start to the year, and altogether
too many of my heroes are dead.
Too many of the old
villains too; those familiar monsters
are gone, replaced
by new and more appalling terrors,
as fear is rebranded for a freshly emergent demographic.
All the girls are much too young for me. Everyone
is too young for me.
When they speak, I hear
only static, like
the ghosts of extinct, pre-digital
TV screens haunting the
empty beauty of their
dead channel mouths.
In the supermarket, they've taken to
playing songs I like on their
in-store radio, wedged between
corporate jingles and adverts for
two-for-one offers on
hot dogs in jars, and I'm
so irrelevant I could cry.
I'm struggling with the world and my
own inability to find somewhere
I can be in it. I can't relax, can't
stop fighting against inertia, contentment
and any hope of peace. Maybe drugs
are the answer, but I think they'd just
make me forget the question.
I feel the cold, and I
want to sleep too much. I miss
my bad habits, but not enough
to relapse. I'm not
young enough or cute enough
to get away with
this much ******* angst.

'Don't you ever worry,' she asked,
'about being written off as
a poor man's Bukowski?'

I answer, quite honestly
for a pretentious, wannabe poet:
'I'd be happy being
anyone's
Bukowski.'

Which was a cute line, I thought,
but she still
didn't **** me.

Maybe I was
someone's
Bukowski, but I
definitely wasn't
hers.

She was young and slim and beautiful,
my first love,
with skin like licked caramel, and
always smelling, always tasting
like peach candy.  But still,
I sort of envy Bukowski his
300lb *****, the painted leviathan that
swallowed whole his virginity and
broke his bed, before falling snoring asleep
on her wide, sea-creature back, because he
probably learned more from that ugliness
than I ever learned from
beauty.

That said, I envy him more the night
the old dog buried his bone
in six separate gardens,
the dark-haired woman who
sent him a photo of  her
self
reading his book
in the  bath, and the two perfect
blonde Dutch girls his editor found on the great man's lawn
when he called by one evening,
the both of them waiting for Hank to
come home from the track
so they could **** him.

Not often, but
there are times
when the noise in my head
turns way up
and the dial breaks off,
and all I want is quiet,
when I feel the pull
of something terminal,
feel the dark, velvety lure
of swallowed pills or gun barrel,
the stealthy seduction of carbon monoxide,
the skull-exploding swan dive
onto shocked concrete,
the warm bath with low light and sharp blades.
I can covet that big, simple answer, too, sometimes.
I can long for that complete, forever silence.
But I know I'm only window shopping.

I love my black cat,
for all his brokenness, his brain
damage, his tendency to
drool and
to fall off
things.  
I love him dearly,
in spite or perhaps because of
these various defects,
and he loves me back
with a fierce and simple purity
like only idiots can.

Still, I
sometimes wish
we could time travel together,
he and I,
and I could take him to Ancient Egypt
and show the Pharoah, the priests, the acolytes and the slavedrivers.
I'd show them my wonderful cat
with his wobbly eyes, his
flailing windmill limbs and
his perfect idiot love,
and I'd tell them all:
'This is your God.
Reevaluate.'