The Dark Days of...Poetry - Trisha Sugarek's Blog

Time for a bit of Bukowski and yours truly!

how is your heart? Charles Bukowski ©

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment--
I wouldn't call it
happiness--
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occurring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.

it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.

to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade--
this was the craziest kind of
contentment
and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror--
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.

what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

LEFT BEHIND  Trisha Sugarek ©

Let me come with you
don’t leave me here
waking each morning forgetting,
between sleep
and wake, that you have gone.

My body, confident that if I reach
for you across the lonely bed you
will be there warm and sleepy
Skin smooth clean and sweeter
than any man has a right to be.

Turning to you with my triumphs,
my hurt, my happiness, my
defeat. Taken for granted, the
sharing now lost forever.

Laughter delights the heart but the
art of causing another to laugh is
the true joy--all lost

I still smell your cigarette smoke,
hear your voice, and feel your
foot fall, your presence so solid
that I speak aloud to you

Cursing you for leaving me,
pleading with you to return,
begging that fate turn back the clock
beseeching that events be
rewritten, different, so at the last
possible moment, I will save you.

Did you miss my Interview with Charles Bukowski? http://www.writeratplay.com/2014/08/02/the-writers-corner-an-interview-with-charles-bukowski-posthumously/