[O]r Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with
Christ on his mind[.]
          —Bukowski¹

                    i.

Taking a gamble with fantasy,
I bet on the impossible and
made a man who was everything,
his legs two long days rising to meet
tomorrow with a bag and an eye
rolling out of a pipe, a tighten-
ing rope opening to a stranger’s
mouth or fist pulling out the stuff in-

side, feathers of white heat pillowing
clouds tearing dreams papering my mind’s
walls into bolts of dried leaves thunder-
ing from the middle of my spine in-
to the bowels of sleep, filling my
thoughts with scenes whose obscenity jolt-
ed me awake, an oyster-grey hu-
mid daze of quicksilver licks falling

like manna from his heaven’s kalei-
doscope into the gutted throat from
the focus of which I pull these fa-
ding things I quote, choking on what comes
melting with a Polaroid vengeance
back into my hand and spills from my
pen whenever I remember nights
with him and write, on the backs of cam-

els smouldering needles of thoughts trot
across deserts of pixels, a scat-
tered caravan of stinging loads
thick as chalk scratched off the headboard I
bang my ideas against, for his
sticking with its script, giving as my
thanks this angst dripping as wax does from
a bard’s midnight taper onto the

waiting paper of a lyric’s page,
raging sheets into hurricane hymns
no one’s but my own loneliest heart
can sing, troubadour and tribal in
my gathering of these analo-
gies my too-mortal panic at his
fading so soon after making him
of pieces from every broken

                    ii.

beast’s flesh on which I have previous-
ly feasted, full-primitive, the fa-
ding of my chimæra from reli-
gious preoccupation into myth-
ic oblivion on waking ne-
cessitates this quaking eulogiz-
ing of a lover I cannot have,
so nearly-manifest from the sweat-

ing scraps of questionable men I
have already had, a Frankenstein’s
hustler throwing-together of the
cock, the balls, the slain pelt’s chest fur, bush,
and bushy asshole of others I
have already licked, tasted, fucked, and
eaten, sticky fingers stitching in-
to a decapitated torso

this creation whose head I intend
to give him without any strings of
attachment when, again to bed, to-
gether we return to Eden each,
finally, the one of whom we have
both been dreaming, Adams coming out
(of hiding), a husband a possi-
bility defeated only by

its disbelief keeping him from real-
ly appearing, so I keep “compil-
ing data” instead of dating, call-
ing the promiscuity of my
constant cruising, the ongoing curse
of this hooking-up which is a din-
ner of infinite courses (gorging
on illusion), “research” for a “book”

I am doomed (having already damned
my Self by this decadence, the ex-
cess of its endless work) to always
be writing, an unrelenting “proj-
ect” fuelled by a monstrous thirst for
lightning, seeking its lasting spark in
passing “satisfaction” (and never
finding it), this defines a poet.

__________
¹Charles Bukowski, “no wonder”, [Stanza 1, Lines 30–31], in The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951–1993: Edited by John Martin, published at New York by Ecco in 2008; page 92.