Joey Cloudy online

I 

The Science of Poetry

Einstein’s incendiary ideas 

words arranged in an  idea of order 

mathematical sequencing 

it is the intellectual alchemy 

of the dead watchmaker thoughts boiled in time 

reduced in a nanosecond of synaptic flash 

to the ashen essence of humanity.  

The pure black symmetry of silhouette in shadow, 

tarot cards tossed into uncertainties  

principally chaotic winds, 

ten land face up, 

six are reversed, 

one perfectly horizontal to another. 

A binary vocabulary of zeros and ones  

the electric language of machines. 

II 

Bukowski was a beat poet. 

Bukowski was not a Beat poet. 

Ya know what I’m saying? 

He’s on the short list  

of guys who never fucked

Di Prima or Ginsberg  

and you can’t really be a Beat  

if you never fucked one of them, 

or fucked somebody who fucked one of them. 

Di Prima is too young to be a Beat  

but she was kind once and fucked old Kerouac.  

III 

I only heard two Bukowski poems  

before my girlfriend bought  

the 1997 poetry east ABC 

at the Lakewood branch of the Dallas public library 

for fifty cents. I only read the about the authors first; 

Cormons introduction is nothing less than extraordinary 

(why)  Kerouac did not want to be a Beat 

but then there was that mutual masturbation incident  

with Ginsberg in college. 

IV 

I’m talking about Charles Bukowski, 

my girlfriend gave me another one of his poems 

to read. I don’t think I liked the poem as much as she did, 

actually, I don’t think I cared for that last poem at all. 

She says he was a Beat and I don’t argue with women, 

what’s the point? 

Yesterday she showed me  

a grainy black and white photograph  

of the late mister Bukowski 

on the last page

of ‘Burning In Water Drowning In Flames’ 

and I swear I smelled Old Grand Dad on his breath.