8 Count
from my bed
I watch 3 birds
on a telephone
wire.
one flies
off.
then
another.
one is left,
then
it too
is gone.
my typewriter is
tombstone
still.
and I am
reduced to bird
watching.
just thought I’d
let you
know,
fucker.
–Charles Bukowski
Sunday, I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthodox to the
west.
she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rythmic dance
reading the Bible. . .
long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long yellow legs warm in the sun. . .
there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to. . .
my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rhythms of the
symphony. . .
she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.
I am God.
| it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street I used to get drunk and throw the radio through the window while it was playing, and, of course, it would break the glass in the window and the radio would sit there on the roof still playing and I’d tell my woman, “Ah, what a marvelous radio!” the next morning I’d take the window off the hinges and carry it down the street to the glass man who would put in another pane. I kept throwing that radio through the window each time I got drunk and it would sit there on the roof still playing- a magic radio a radio with guts, and each morning I’d take the window back to the glass man. I don’t remember how it ended exactly though I do remember we finally moved out. there was a woman downstairs who worked in the garden in her bathing suit, she really dug with that trowel and she put her behind up in the air and I used to sit in the window and watch the sun shine all over that thing while the music played. |
