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Ray Suarez Dec 2015
Hemingway was real
Good at it.
And
Bukowski,London,Faulkner,Joyce,
McCullers
Fitzgerald,Thom­pson, Kerouac etc.
I've heard 20 year old
Girls
And
40 year old
Women
Speak ill
Of drunks.
I always want to ask
"What did you ever
Accomplish
Sober
That was so
Great?"
Fante always seemed real
Pure to me
The innocence
The young
Burning
Passion
Of his lines.
I read
A biography today
And even
Fante was a *******
Drunk.
I smiled
Exposing the missing tooth
In the back
Cracked the cap
And felt
Even more hopeful.
The blood of
Christ.
Ray Suarez  Nov 2015
2015
Ray Suarez Nov 2015
First
She walked out
And I had to learn
That I was a coward
An orphaned lover
An old house cat
Abandoned
In a grocery store parking lot
I had to face it again
The emptiness
I smoked all of those nights
Away
I was numb
I was nothing
I lost 30 lbs in 2 months
Then it all caught up with me
One night my heart started beating
Rapidly
I couldn't breath
Started to shake
I sat in a corner and watched
The room grow ten times it's size
I heard a static crack in the ears
I was lost and unhuman
I was a rabid dog trapped in a corner
I felt sick for weeks after
So
I gave up the ***
Switched to drinking
Whole bottles of whiskey
128 lbs, shirtless, screaming
The fellas laughed at the beginning
Until I started throwing ****
Trying to fight everybody, anybody
I had 3 new catch phrases
"I'll ****** **** you man"
"I'll smash all your ******* teeth in"
"I've seen it all man."
After a while it became
Too much for the fellas
And soon they were all gone
So
I found better company
Dostoevsky, Fante,Bukowski,Hemingway,
Hamsun,Lorca,Sartre, etc.
I found a ****** apartment
in San Pedro
Drank beer and read every night
Until the loneliness felt comfortable
And then I
Accidentally
Became alcoholic
Then i took my wild act
To the streets
A few weeks ago I was at a concert
And this guy kept elbowing me
In the ribs
I said "If you keep sticking that elbow
To me, I'll ****** **** you man."
I said it cool and soft
And the guy looked real scared
And I was too
So
I had to quit drinking...
I keep thinking about
Zarathustra
Rising from his cave
After years of solitude...
A guy at work said
"November's almost gone
Man, this year just blew right by"
And I thought
'Good.'
Ben Brinkburn Mar 2014
Off the job again and
secretly wishing I wasn't but
keeping the bravado crystal
and sharp
trying to stay cool
reading Beckett and
and  Fante
the suit isn't threadbare yet but give it time
whiskey flowers and
tequila headaches
and the roller girl shouted
'hey mac, get a job!'
broadside smiles
trying to stay cool
watching Bronson, Brecht
and  Bertolucci
looking forward to
the next drink
burning matches and seriously considering
setting fire to the curtains
***** old town
Ray Suarez Jun 2015
I screamed out
"**** the rent!"
Then pulled out another
20
I stared at all the
Sad
Woman at the bar
All waiting
To be ******
But they had never read Fante
And that bothered me
So I went home
Alone
Opened another beer
And wrote another poem
That nobody
Cared about
Ray Suarez Dec 2015
I was thinking of a poem
About a girl I saw
With a starved face
Eyes bulging
Teeth protruding
A screaming skeleton of despair
I saw her and thought
I could love you...
But that was interrupted
By a poem about a new fondness
For sleeping pills
Numbness
I once tried to cry at night
But couldn't
And I felt like a real
******* for even trying...
I walked into the bathroom
And threw a few jabs
And right hooks
Into the mirror
I thought
I'm 5'7
145 lbs
Just like Barrera, Morales, Chavez
All the great Mexican fighters
I walked out and thought of quotes
By Fante, Sartre, something Hemingway said
I looked at all the people around me
And thought
They couldn't quote anybody
Jesus Christ!
What the hell do THEY think about?
It must be terrifying!
They don't read
They don't scream
They don't fight
They don't go on drinking binges
Where's the scars?
Where's the passion?
Where's the life?
But then I noticed
They were all smiling
Talking
Laughing
Walking
Together
I suddenly felt a massive
Heaviness
Upon me
I noticed it had been there
All along
Maybe
I've been doing it all wrong
Ray Suarez  Oct 2015
Whats a Man?
Ray Suarez Oct 2015
I woke this morning
With no hangover
After the 10 beers last night
I made a *** of hot black coffee
Slugged it down
Listened to the local jazz AM
While enjoying the absence of the sun
The cold grey clouds
are better company
I read a few shorts by Hem
And a couple pages of Dos
I got off the mattress
And threw a few jab and hook
Combinations toward the window
I got dressed
Walked past the picture of Fante
On my wall
Then I ****
In the community bathroom
Of my roominghouse
I thought about
What a man is
Should be
Probably not this
But definitely not
My father
And I was far from that
I tried my best to be
Far from all of that
Ray Suarez  Dec 2015
Rm.101
Ray Suarez Dec 2015
I parked the car in downtown
San Pedro
I stood in the rain outside the
Cabrillo Hotel
The people looked awful
Battered
There was a homeless punk woman
With face tattoos
Staring at me from her dry corner
A 50 year old woman spilled from the bar to the street
She reeked of wine
"*******! Some ******* dropped me off here and left! Can you give me a ride? That *******! My husband's a doctor ******! My son goes to UCLA! Can you give me a ride?"
She reeked of ****
A small ***** old man sat on the bar
Steps
Smoking Buglers
He shook his head at me
"Don't do it son, she's outta her mind."
The landlord finally came down
Showed me Rm. 101
It was a 30x25 space
With a mini fridge, closet, the mirror
A sink to **** in
The landlord said "You can see the downtown from the window."
I looked out
A trash can in an alley.
I just kept thinking about
Fante's Ask the Dust,Dreams from Bunker Hill
Bukowski's poem How to be a Great Writer
I hoped they were right
"I'll take it."
The first night the couple next door
Had a fist fight
And a fat cockroach crawled up my back in bed
The drunks ran up and down the halls at 3AM
I was not happy
But Rm 101 toughened me up
Very well
It became my oasis in hell
I have everything I need
Coffee maker, air mattress, radio
Beers in the fridge, big stack of books, most importantly
A place to get away
From the madness of the people
And when I finally get out of this
*******
I think I might miss it
let a machine
do all the thinking
for a man
and he won't worry
about anything
but himself;
but let be a man
who does all the thinking
and he'll worry about everything excluding himself;
and today,
in this modern present day,
let an intellectual
read this kind of stuff
and he'll think of all the men
who might have said the same thing
and the author
becomes unoriginal,
pretentious to him.
this generation is fat.
this generation is at its peak disadvantage.
this generation
will never have its own
Hemingway, Kerouac, Salinger,
Steinbeck, Ginsberg, McCullers, Rimbaud,
Plath, Fante, Bukowski,
Vonnegut, Camus etc. (and Nietzsche)
this generation. .
it is so tiring to think for it.
Laokos Feb 2021
bathed in a beam of distant light, i'm
dangling from the mouth of
the sun today. it won't come like
Fante. it won't come like Bukowski.
it won't come at all. it's rusted
chunked blood calving off from
graveled glaciers onto dead sea beds.
it's a joke, it's far away, it's not
meant for me. and so it seems...yet
there still exists a tiny heart somewhere
under all that pumping away almost
imperceptibly.  funneling what blood
is there to send life to these
fingertips. i don't know if it will
ever reach the page though. odds
are good that death will take me
before those veins reach any words
with weight.
but in the writing they have a
chance to stretch and feel and
find their way through the
labyrinth of time and being
human. they have a chance to
beat the odds. a trickle becomes
a stream. a stream becomes a
river. and a river becomes an
ocean. these dead seas will fill
once more whether i am: the glacier,
the trickle, the stream or the
river. my blood runs to that future
ocean...one way or another.
frozen blood glacier dead sea veins labyrinth human odds ocean

— The End —