Down to the bone

Shoelace Hardly anyone reads the old books anymore, in the old way, listening for a sound, or something familiar. People are forgetting what words are, how they operate, how the order is crucial. A writer worth his salt can play his mind and yours like its a piano, and make it look like he's not even trying. On the issue of order, you can't get that right unless you've first spent some time gutting your own soul, pared away the layers until you're open, pulsating vessels like a pike in a Hong Kong fish market. If you're willing to do what it takes, you can take a lot of the hard things. What the subsidy chasers and the networkers haven't figured out is that in the end you lose your teeth anyways.

I've been thinking about Rudy since that San Francisco junket, and wondering what his gig was with this Queer Identity construction he always harped on about. It's about orifices, it's not about identity. The thing about fifty per cent of the queers is that they like taking it up the ass, and the thing about the other fifty per cent is they like sticking it up where the sun don't shine, and all the public hand-holding on Fisherman's Wharf and all the cooking classes and queer identity construction identity doesn't alter those basic figures a whit. Of course, when you think about it, those stats are impressive - by my calculation about 97.8 per cent of the general population are taking it up the ass on a regular basis. Maybe the queers are some kind of superior later evolution and we're the orangutangs. Bukowski read the old books. He spent time in old libraries. He did time on skid row, and in the army. And nobody could touch him when he laid it out. Bukowski didn't give a shit about narrative or form. Buke could lay out a line so fiercely that you'd fear ever running into a man like that. There was beauty in that dirty old man. He had elegance. A gentleman in the end, somebody who could take it on the chin. I talked to this woman who calls herself a writer. I couldn't make head or tails of a word coming out of her mouth. I reached for a volume of Buke, and fell across a poem "The Shoelace" "...the dread of life is that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer and which are always there - license plates or taxes or expired driver's license, or hiring or firing doing it or having it done to you..." I could feel the eyelids dropping, and the mind slowing down again. Buke could take away the loneliness and make it his. He was a saint that way.