First Place Winner, April 2006 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, April 2006

ON THE DAY BUK CHECKED OUT
Stevie Reed
(Blueline Poetry Forum)

The day Bukowski died
I was a real working dancer.
But on a stage in low rent strip joint
in the tenderloin was where they found me.
All of the girls and me young enough
so the utter sadness of the place couldn’t touch us.
We were like so many romantics
digging for life where real artists went.
In the dark,
before dark could overcome. Soaked in scotch
before it could leave its mark upon our faces.
Where it was unbleached
wild and savory.
We were angles. Full of levity
when such heaviness was passed down to us
from other sad people.
We were just carrying it then.
Not fully absorbing or ingesting it then,
Not living it yet. Just enough poison

to get us through the door.
Just enough innocence to elevate us from the floor.
I was a Bukowski girl, pre-damaged, pre-broken.
And he was dying of leukemia, not liver failure
not lung cancer.

I was 21
In an old and dignified cabaret hall, near the ocean, not the skid row
where streets are lined with donut /Chinese food eateries.
Me on stage, Buk in a hospital bed
...like Dylan visiting Guthrie.
The spot light shone on my back

and I heard the crowd flooding the stage,
ambient and excited chatter. The air only pools smoke,
mold spores from legendary curtains.
Glasses, stars twinkling in the center of it.
I’m drunk too. Forgotten all the expensive choreography.
I belonged to something like surviving a crash.
I was procured, plucked, exploited, juiced.
My pale figure, ribs showing.
The end of a relationship was near.
Buk was almost gone
and I’ll only ever know him by shelving him,
singing him, recognizing him
from that dangerous place of human suffering,
that mirror, that red glowing exit in the corner.

The music played. I was paid to play
a genuine woman of debauchery.
A genuine lost soul.
But you’re never lost
in art. You’re never lost in youth.
You’ve yet to descend in the midst of either.

Just light, and drunk, and spinning.
I moved into whatever needed to come next.
I was a 20th. century term, LIVE.
Just expression,
surrounded by people taking it in for themselves.
Putting their faces on mine, vice versa.
Art becoming the world and
I was moving it around,
just for a moment.
Never analyzing it,
not in this poem.

The wake of our century’s Whitman
rocks us. Ripped poetry
from the grasps of academics.
Me and Buk and all my friends,
saved by poems.
Spoken for.

Judge David Biespiel’s comments: “Though Charles Bukowski’s regular-guy-at-the-video-poker-machine-at-the-end-of-the-bar routine hasn’t excited me much over the years, I found this poem’s hurt & longing & homage memorable & sweet.”