Down in the Dirt poetry

Charles Bukowski Road Not Chosen

And Other Poems

By Jake Cosmos Aller

Published in Down in the Dirt

Charles Bukowski Road Not Chosen

John ("Jake") Cosmos Aller

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 women 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 another path

Would I have ended up
Somewhere else
Doing something else


Would I have been as happy
Would I have been as successful?


There is no answer that satisfies
The longing in my heart
For that wild thing
That still lurks beneath
It's 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 "Bukowskian"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.

Order this writing in the book Negative Space (the 2017 poetry, flash fiction & art collection anthology)		get the 298 page poem, flash fiction & art collection anthology as a 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Fallen Dreams Litter the Ground

John ("Jake") Cosmos Aller

In the fall weather
As I walk amid the falling leaves
I see the signs everywhere

Of the fall of America
The once great and mighty Empire
Everywhere signs of the fall appear

The dark skies mirror
The darkness that settled over our land

Death, destruction and random acts of chaos
Are all around us
Surrounding us with visions of doom

Nothing can stop the bloodletting
No one seems to be in charge

As the leaves fall
And the darkness descends
The fall of America continues

My Name Is Nobody

John ("Jake") Cosmos Aller

My name, it is Nobody
No one cares who I am
I am just a nameless clone
In the cold unfeeling bureaucracy

Just one of the army
Of civilians who flood into and out of the city
Every day

A non-entity,
A ghost
A govbot
A cyber
A spook
A faceless automan
A bureaucrat

Just a grey suited cog in the machinery
And no one cares
No one knows who I really am

And I am legend
Everywhere and nowhere

Just the way this modern world
All shred of humanity
Crushed beneath the cruel wheel of society

In the cold harsh world
There is no room anymore
For true human feelings

We are just robots, clones, machines
And so I go to work
Put on my mask

And no one hears my inner screams
And no one will ever care

Strangeness in the Air

John ("Jake") Cosmos Aller

There is a strangeness in the air
A sense of cosmic unease
Hangs silently in the purple crystalline sky

America woke up
And decided it was time
To quit following like lemmings
Over the Clift

As the pied piper chants
Stay the course, stay the course
We were like lemmings following him
Dying to save his wounded pride

Today there is that strange difference
In the air
As Americans woke up
And threw off their chains of fear