My first book of poems and The Crunch by Charles Bukowski

 Ahead of the release of my first book of poems (I cringe at calling it poetry as that seems far too elegant a word for the dreck I write) and have again come back to the stark and minimalist brilliance of one of if not my very favorite poem, The Crunch by Charles Bukowski.

Aside from the likes of Shel Silverstein and Lewis Carroll in elementary school, I'm not terribly well-versed in poetry. I've always been a fan of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and while his classics more or less defined the flavor of a pre-millenial chronically angsty faux-goth kid like me, the world of poetry is vast and deep and even overwhelming in it's scope.

Enter "The Crunch", so simple and direct in it's depiction of loneliness and the human condition and thought ultimately told from a first-person perspective, reads as if seen through God's own eye. If I could name a poem I love so much I wish I had written it, this would be it. Sometimes you find your feelings in someone else's words. A person all too often dead and gone and you understand they didn't change the world but their ghost did touch yours, and all you wished to say has been said before and the world didn't listen. And that, my friends, is The Crunch.

The Crunch by Charles Bukowski

too much
too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody.

laughter or
tears

haters
lovers

strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks

armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.

or an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.

people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.

I suppose they never will be.
I don't ask them to be.

but sometimes I think about
it.

the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child
like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.

too much
too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody

more haters than lovers.

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.

meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.

there must be a way.

surely there must be a way we have not yet
thought of.

who put this brain inside of me?

it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.

it will not say
"no."