BUKOWSKI HATES YOU

Forget-me-not’s and other things
Like good literature, cd’s and poems
Paintings and photographs and

Of course my long legs and small tight breasts

And Love.

Bukowski met you on your sofa and
Had Christmas with you and….

You weren’t supposed to share
‘Ham And Rye’ with the unwitting.

She depressingly listened with half ear as
You read aloud
And half-embraced ‘Infinite Jest’
As all try and fail to do.

You hold your head out the airplane window now
Drying and withering your thoughts

Of me.

Letting the love you felt course out
Of your body like urine dispensed
From a catheter about to burst.

Oh the relief you feel.

Urine scatters through clouds and sky
And lands on ground and
Sprouts up buds of love
That can never die.

Real love is like that.
Did you know?

And you run your way up North
As far away from the depression that
Lives inside you,
down South.

You thought you left it there in a suitcase
In the dairy aisle,

When you got up and ran so abruptly.

Is it possible to escape
Your own mind if you circle it long enough?
Perhaps the unwitting will help you
With that,
As she braids your hair and puts fancy
Ribbons in it.
And goes to her 9 to 5,
Pretending to be a
French-Spanish-only-partly-American
FBI agent.
Her thighs are getting fatter yet and her
Hair is too thin for her age. 
Do you feel loved now?

Until the day,
Perhaps in two weeks,
Maybe in two years,
When the sadness returns.

The polarizing despondency.
The paralyzing numbness.

Do you know what that is?

It is love missing its target.
It is your bleeding heart,
Your self-inflicted wound.
It is the door to love slammed
Closed on your artery.

You're bleeding out

And as your lifeline leaves you,
Pain simultaneously grips you at your toes and travels
The length of your body like
Venom from a poisonous snake.

But where is she? Where is the love you thought you had?
In a Brooklyn apartment baking muffins?
In a Manhattan office saving coins
For your future,

Or for your lunch tomorrow?

The crippling feeling of not being alive stays with you.
Seems it will never leave,
Unless old friend Whiskey comes over or
Dependable unwitting holds your hand and blows on you.

Just as you can’t escape the rise of day and night,
Your mind becomes a painful sun and moon.
The contrast,
The no in-between place
Provides the least bit of comfort.

You become an overstretched rubber band,
Once again.
And you wonder about that suitcase you left there,
And you wish for the nourishment of

The anti-venom (true love).

It was there all along,
It is still there
In that suitcase,
Stuffed into,

In the dairy aisle.

Hiding on the dark shelf
In the back,
Behind all the fresh gallons
And it withers and writhes at the sight of a hand coming near

And longingly holds-out for yours.

Bukowski hates you for it.
Because you shared him out
Of fear and didn't trust what was real.

Stephanie lorentzen-jordan

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