Poetry Superhighway April 2023 Poems

Charles Bukowski road not chosen PSH

Charles Bukowski road not chosen PSH

while reading Charles Bukowski poetry
on the metro ride home
listening to Buddha bar music
on my oh-too-hip iPod

I begin to see myself as I was
over 30 years ago when I was merely a bit player
a minor character in a Charles Bukowski poem

a wild young underemployed intellectual
hanging out in dismal bars and dives all over asia and California
hanging with disreputable women and drunks and drinkers
and characters out of his kinds of haunts

a mad poet bard of the underground
a drunken poet in a drunken bum show
that nightly played in his head

then one day I met the woman of my dreams
and went down a different path
a long slow path to respectability

and now 30 years later
I am no longer a wild man
I am still a poet at heart
but I am now also a bureaucrat
in a button-down suite

doing the people's business
working for the government
I've become the man

sometimes I wonder
would I have been better off
going down that other path



would I have ended up
somewhere else
doing something else

would I have been as happy
would I have been as successful?

No answer satisfies
the longing in my heart
for that wild thing
that still lurks beneath
it's a civilized cover

and I know that I am still
a mad poet at heart
railing against the injustice of the world

as I work day by day in the belly of the great beast of state
I recall the ancient Chinese saying,
"Confucian during the day while Taoist rebel at night"
playing out in my head and nightly dreams
in the true American upper-class patrician tradition

I close the book
and look out the window
get off the train,
and walk slowly home

and realize I had no choice
but to take the path that I''ve trodden on

and so I put aside my misgivings
and say goodbye to my "Bukowski" desires
for another night of domestic contentment

was it worth it all to take the conventional path
and not take the bohemian road to hell and back

I look at my wife and realize
I had no choice, had no choice
but to follow her to the ends of the earth

and beyond by her side as we walked our path
of shared destiny

goodbye
Charles Bukowski
wherever you are
may I meet you in a bar in the next life
and figure out where we should have gone

until then the drinks are on me.






“If I had…” or roads not taken.
Write a poem imagining/focussing on how your life or your subject’s life could have been changed or become different if one decision had been made that was different from what happened. What risks did you take or avoid? What benefits came your way or did you miss out on? Examples: what if you had married the first person you loved or who loved you? What if the hitchhiking ride you and a buddy took turned bad rather than being the lark it was? What if you hadn’t accepted that job in another city but decided to stay put? What if you had not blown up at a social event and been shunned after that by people who had counted as your friends?
If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the poetry super highway Facebook group.
#napowrimo #poetry

April 11, 2023: poetry writing prompt from ed meek