Thinking of Charles Bukowski

I love to read Charles Bukowski My Brother, Bill could have written like him Sitting at a rust-leg old table in that fractured rectangle above a liquor store in downtown Littleton, Colorado This Littleton (I don't know how it is now) was one of those towns where every other store downtown was a liquor store where buildings were so 1880s you damn well better have a rope ladder out your window So this poem really isn't about C.B. It is about my strange Brother, Bill I wrote another poem about him once when he was a child I say he was strange but only in retrospect I suspect Before Martin Luther King Before bussing Before NAACP Before gay lib was Bill self-proclaimed champion of the underdog and as a product of the depression champion of the down-and-out He tried to act tough - actually he WAS tough - talk hard as a diamond in the rough But way down deep - no one ever plumbed the depth - was a sensitive artist lover of fine music portrait photographer quietly alive to all the world's beauty as well as ills If you happened to hit that unplumbed depth of vein depth of energy with a subject dear or by depression day standards controversial Bill's eyes would lose focus like turned around searching his brain his whole red meat being welling up to the tip of his tongue And any moment you expected some outburst his body fairly shaking..... But all you got generally was a click of the tongue a well thought out grunt..... "Awww HELL Dave!"