This is for eightbitsamurai
after Bukowski
You are 10,000 milligrams of caffeine
burning through my blood in
insect-jitters or
you are like looking at the sky
to see night has fallen
to see the cold shaking stars
and finding the moon
is big enough to climb into.
You are insomnia
without feeling tired.
You are the Buddha of completion,
the Nirvana of to-do lists
you have silenced my starvation
without killing my hunger
for more
I think that you have killed isolation,
murdered loneliness
and also bad tigers
there is a dollar crumbled
in my pocket
like a piece of trash
like a poem
and also like a dollar
I could not go to sleep
tonight because I could not
let the world keep living
without being there to see it
and now I am scrawling ideas
across George Washington's stern and disapproving face.
.
Explanation: I wrote this poem in 2010 or so when trying to describe what Adderal felt like to me during the height of my addiction. It is a response poem to a Bukowski poem. I do not remember what poem. I do not think it is published on the web. I was reading a lot of Bukowski then so I can't even pinpoint a book I'm afraid.
from the discussion here
in a similar vein, my favorite Bukowski poem was a good description of a lot of the addiction and madness and depression and isolation I saw in a lot of my friends back around 2010, and some in myself as well. Some people had it from drugs, others from abuse, others from just fucked up brain chemistry. It resonated with all of us:
Alone with Everybody by Charles Bukowski
the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.
there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill