Channeling Bukowski

[IsabellaRose]

I won't lie, I definitely wrote a lot of poetry trying to channel Charles Bukowski... or at least that's what it looks like in hindsight. I know I read a lot of Bukowski back then, because he felt like home.

I think at the time I was trying to mine my life for the words that would paint what I felt, and no other style of writing aside from confessional diary entries seemed to make anything stick. But like most poetry, everything I wrote was pretentious, filled with weak attempts to describe emotion and life with mere words, as if words alone could convey the smells, the textures, the feelings,...physical or emotional. They can't, but sometimes they suggest enough to evoke something that might mimic what your particular experience tells you the author might have felt, and I guess that's close enough for mere mortals.

I found a lot of stuff from the old days. A box of notebooks, thumb drives, and a few old laptop hard drives, two of which I could access with the help of a tech friend. There's stuff on there that is terrible, but some that's okay. You can see my inspiration - Bukowski is a massive influence, some might say I ripped off his style, and I definitely did, or tried to, in a lot of those writings, even if unintentionally. But also paintings that are mostly garbage, but sometimes inspired, clearly influenced by Mary Abbott and Elaine de Kooning... sketches where it looks like I'm in high school trying to draw still life without lifting my pencil, collages where it looks like I was just paste and angst on a bad drug trip, but sometimes inspired.

Anyway... I'll share some of that stuff here. Poems that still make me embarrassed, not for what they try to convey, but for the weak attempt at conveying it, and mostly in someone elses' style, even if I tried to make it my own voice.

Maybe I'll start with a hopeful one.

[IsabellaRose]

what happens next

I wasn’t supposed to get this far.
There was no plan for month six,
just a shaky day one
followed by a hundred and eighty-two more shaky day ones,
(but who's counting?)
and somehow now
six months on
I floss my teeth.
I eat breakfast.
I pay rent early
like someone who wants to keep her place.

I’ve got a closet with more running shoes than regrets
on most days,
and I haven’t woken up beside a stranger
in so long
I forget how it feels
to trade loneliness for someone else’s hunger.

sometimes I want it back
the oblivion,
the lie of invincibility,
the fast, hot "fuck you" to the world
that felt like freedom
even when it was just me losing again.

I think about that a lot.

I think about how easy it would be
to buy a bottle,
to ruin a week,
to disappear into a bar booth
and a back room or back seat
like a magic trick no one claps for.

but I don’t.

not because I’m better
or healed
or whole.

but because I’m too goddamn stubborn
to let this world win.

and maybe because
the sunrise over the city this morning
looked like something i could paint.
and maybe because
the silence in my bed
is finally just silence
and not a scream.

and maybe
just maybe
it's curiosity.

Maybe I want to see what happens next.

[IsabellaRose]

This one is definitely less Bukowski inspired, but it's newer and I haven't felt like the girl who wrote that old stuff for a long time. Who knows, maybe I finally found my own voice. 

 

if i could reach her

There were too many nights,
too many hands,
too many back rooms thick with smoke
and names I never learned.
I said yes like it meant
I was winning something.
Like it would stitch me together
instead of pulling me apart,
thread by red thread.

I wasn’t wild, not really.
I was just tired of being
nothing but bones and waiting.
So I gave myself away
like free matches in a bowl by the door,
take one, light it,
walk away.

Now I sit with tea,
clean pajamas,
the quiet kindness of age,
and I want to go back
not to scold her,
not to shame her,
but to touch her face,
say, it doesn’t have to hurt like this.
Say, you don’t owe them your body
just because you feel empty.

She wouldn't believe me.
She’d laugh,
pull some stranger into her mouth
just to feel something spark.

But still,
I’d sit with her in that place,
hold her hair,
and say her name like a promise
someone should have kept.