Kafka Can’t Cross a Street
by james bezerra
One night
Bukowski visits me,
dead more
than twenty years now
he looks
the same, since he always looked
mostly dead
anyhow, except for his liver which
always appeared
to be a throbbing stone.
Perched at the corner of
my mattress,
shoulders slumped like
Rodin’s sketchbook,
he’s a patient Jacob Marley smoking
the cigarettes
I hide from myself in a kitchen cup and
he’s ashing
into my carpet.
“We fuckers are all beatified now,”
he growls,
looking at me across his sharp
shoulder blade,
“You know how many movies they’ve made
about Ginsberg?
We’re all whores, to be sure
but death
is humiliating enough without getting
screenwriters involved.”
Ash. Puff. Ash. Puff.
Ash. Puff.
“They teach McCullers in classrooms now
class rooms!
She tabledanced with Marilyn Monroe and
lived with
Gypsy Rose Lee and
she’d be
mortified if she found out.
Kafka can’t
cross a street without signing
an autograph.
Poor bitch so shy he couldn’t drop
his trousers
on a nudist beach.
They make us into idols so they can
forget us.
Kerouac is chained to the radiator at a
book group
right now. You wanta go bust him out?”
Instead we drink whiskey from
coffee mugs
until the dawn breaks and his
cock crows
and he fades away so slowly
leaving nothing
but stubbed out butts and a hole
of smoke..
.
.
