I was asked to parrot a poem, so I give you some Bukowski: an almost made up poem I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, "it's all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I'm not jealous because we've never met. we got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched." so you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame -- not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them THAT, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't so sure. maybe it was the upper case. you were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers, editors, "print her, print her, she's mad but she's magic. there's no lie in her fire." I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you pee in the bathroom, but that didn't happen. your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. "kid," i wrote back, "all lovers betray." it didn't help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. it was best like this. -Charles Bukowski +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+