Layover - Charles Bukowski
Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men - poor fools -
work.
That moment – to this…
may be years in the way they measure,
but it’s only one sentence back in my mind -
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I know longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops.
Doing a quick Wikipedia search on Charles Bukowski – full Westernized name Henry Charles Bukowski, and real name Heinrich Karl Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) – led me to an article Time Magazine published in 1986 entitled "Celebrities Who Travel Well." The author Pico Iyer, seemingly incredulous that western celebrities from Madonna to J.R. of Dallas fame had been flung as far and wide to the East as to the rest of the world – and stuck – was equally astonished by Bukowski’s fame “abroad,” referring to him at one point as the “laureate of American lowlife.” It might be fitting then that one day, lowlife would meet up with lowbrow and continue to influence a whole new generation of artists and writers. A good enough reason it seems to have inspired an exhibition of Charles Bukowski-themed works by 30 local artists on view at JETT Gallery in Little Italy.
Tommy McAdams
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