Alan Catlin

Claude Powell's Charles Bukowski

lounges in boxer shorts and short

sleeved shirt, under tee riding up

to expose a hardened belly swollen by

drink and fast foods, receding hair

swept back from his forehead, eyes

closed, face contorted in satanic glee:

enjoying a rude joke at someone else's

expense?, an expansive boast?, a drunken

laugh at man and kind?, confessions

of a dirty old man? Or is he relishing

the shoot taken at close quarters in

a garbage strewn kitchen? an unknown

naked woman on his lap, laughing

as he alternately feels and touches

all the intimate places on her body

in, what first seems to be, a collage of images,

but, later, is known to be, reconstructed

Polaroid snapshots torn by his live-in

lover, Linda, and repaired for posterity,

a false acre of land reclaimed from

the bitch Goddess, Lady McDeath,

the woman he feared the most but

always returned to, late nights,

on the folding wooden chair pulled up

to the ancient manual typewriter,

empty carriage fully extended at the end

of a line, blank pages strewn nearby

on end table and floor, waiting to be filled.