The Smell of Success

Bukowski burps out poems

like prednisone powered hiccups. Cigarette 

ash smears the Remington's eroded

keys. Stale beer stench,

crap gin and sweat floods his room 

hidden at the bitter end of a greasy 

hall. 

As yellowed fingers pound and drum away,

suddenly his eyes glaze, he's become

a crooning Vatican castrato!

An angelic chorus of staccatoed bliss,

of tender albino flesh re-makes him. 

My bad dream is I’ll never mate a muse

as fragrant, flush with life, with sacred

intoxication, as profligate or dangerous as his....

Though my fear is I may indeed sniff her

late one eve, erotic heat hovering

mischievously above my pen or keyboard,

and when and if so ecstatically invaded,

poetically overtaken, mystically shaken,

who then, I find myself pondering,

would mow the crabgrass,

spank the brats,

scare their chums,

clip these coupons,

raise the dead, or

pay that goddamn garbage bill?