bukowski

on the phone, you recite:

“i am upstairs in my underwear/3-day beard, pouring a beer and waiting/ for something literary or symphonic to happen”

and I say, oooh, keep going. What comes next?

you skip to another page – piss me off with references to virgin 35-year-olds too old for love or poetry, redeem yourself with the one about the girl who writes like a long nozzle. one button after another, you press them. I wait for you to arouse the next emotion.

next, you say: “hello, bitches, he answered” and I say that’s not very nice, and you say hey, i’m just reading what’s here. wait, i’ll skip to a better part.

I can hear the page turning, your laborious breathing. I shudder, fulfilled and expectant both - and I think how much easier it is to wait for stories than for babies but I don't say it since you’d wonder who’d said anything about babies.

and then I’d have to answer:
you didn’t. but some women, they think about babies 24/7
and i'd have to decide whether to admit that I’m one of them.

but you’re reading again, telling me about living a life with drugstores, cats, sheets, saliva, newspapers, women, doors but nowhere a living man
and I’m shuddering, shuddering with such pleasure
and can feel you grinning at the other end
because you know i love it when you get lyrical and quote-heavy

(you don’t know that it’s because I need to imagine you as somebody else, pretend you’re a sober bukowski, didion with a dick, a straight o’hara, hell, any eloquent American w/whom I’m just vaguely aware of enough to know that they are the reason why I write or the reason why I want to write since actually I don’t really write I just take notes, I put down quotes for posterity or to give myself the impression that I am being productive, here at my desk with the draft from the window and the wind banging on the glass and the depression lamp helping me feel happy and the whirring noise of the computer reminding me that one day I will lose all my work but what does it matter when there is no work to lose? And what I was meaning to say really is that I keep the phone pressed against my ear, clutching it hard, clutching it eagerly, clutching it strong as if I were holding onto what you’re saying, these lines of verse upon which I hang everything, demanding they carry me into the week and hold me up at least until Wednesday, please let them last until then, on Wednesday I’ll be at the used-book stand again and then I’ll drop off what I’ve found, drop it off at your place then wait for you to call, you appeasing you, you generous you, yes Wednesday night you’ll be giving me other lines, I’ll have found some other writer to satiate this hunger, this ravenous rage, you know what I’m talking about, right? this desire to inhale every sensation in sight, the bottomless pit that is my stomach, the dissatisfaction that needs words if it’s going to be quelled in the slightest, if I could switch it off I would but I can’t so I need you to feed it or at least keep it chewing, I need you on the phone reading, spinning sentences repeating a reality I would dive into if I could, I’d smother myself in it I would lurch through it, unstable in my orthopoedic shoes, holding my balance with my hands as I walk precariously, cautiously, on injured legs pain pain pain pain pain and replay these words and use them to imagine myself one day esconced at a sun-warmed desk like the ones in those photos of writers who are there, who’ve made it, who’ve got it, who’ve had it and now flaunt it, who have a method a voice a process a story a vision a school of thought a following and a. place. to. call. their. own. oh to have a voice! oh to hear a voice! ah, but it is there, that voice – and I am there, holding onto a phone and imagining you are the man I love… and that we are on a page – a great, big, white page, wider than a king-sized bed and just as vast to fuck in.)

keep reading to me, baby. keep going.

quote me bukowski one more time.