It has become at least an intermittent 'tradition' here on Froogville that on Sundays I share a poem with you. And I haven't done that for quite a while.
Charles Bukowski is one of the great 'Unsuitable Role Models' I have celebrated over on my companion blog, the Barstool. I think I've posted two or three bits of his work on there (I can't find the links now - just go and search). But there's no reason why he shouldn't get a mention over here as well; and I've just turned up this piece by him, which, while imbued with the usual melancholy and despair, doesn't have the overt drinking references (well, just the one!) that characterise most of my favourite pieces of his.
Consummation of Grief
I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water is their tears
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)
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