To Charles Bukowski

I never liked
Charles Bukowski
but I'm starting to.
You've got to admire
the long years of
serious commitment
to drinking and rejection
it took to ferment
the anger that singed
a million minds
with only the true love
of a typewriter
to see him through.

He saw the gunky carpets
the cheap apartments
not with the eyes
of the trust fund poet,
that have never been shot
through with the blood
of ripple wine,
but through a face
of salted meat
and eyes hardboiled
and pickled in briny
late nights of
dinged up legs
and dinged up cars,
hungover days
when the dust
haunts the empty room
that the sun won’t
leave the fuck alone
and the empty bottles
chime in the trash
like the dying honks
of a seagull or
an old Ford.
The real days
we're living.

Sure, the clouds
are always there,
the sun, the stars,
but they’re so
high above.

When I see Hank
(If I may call
him that) sitting
in someone's hideous idea
of an armchair,
holding fast to a
cigarette, I see
my grandma coughing
like a muffler
her beautiful red blood
into the rusted snow
of Columbus, Ohio.
Hank is angry,
Hank is nasty,
but Hank is not
wrong

and he is
folding the cocktail
napkins of hotel
lounges into roses.

Charles Bukowski is still read
by the real people
in America
who no longer read.
The real people in America,
whose struggle
is not epic
but mundane, or rather,
whose unhappiness
is heroic
in how small
and ugly
it is.