My Real Dad is a Poem

My father would say get your head out of your ass like most people said hi. To be fair my head was in my ass. Though my ass was a Lewis Carol labyrinth. My father did not say get your head out of your ass to be helpful nor did he know it really was up there, he said it like a skunk raising his tail. My dad was later locked up leaving my head up my ass.
I was left unwanted as a leper dodo chick in a graveyard city, my lobotomized umbilical cord a ectoplasm limp dick in my hand. My dry, empty, hungry, opiate socked so desperately wanted to brim over with unconditional love. But where could I find love, I wasn’t in school so cool teacher was out, bums worked for a bit but the wanted to tell me lies and get hand jobs. Bums did teach me things like, go to university libraries to sleep. Libraries also had erotic picture books you could get off on ( thank you, you art fucks who tricked school boards into believing art was not porn). I also read. I read women's erotic dreams, every word of Orwell, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Whitman, Hess, all the beats. I would walk out with books and read them under bridges and at that weeks job, laying cable, digging ditches, cleaning bee hives, loading barges anything that was under the table and would hire kids. All the while I would let characters from novels kill themselves in my stead. One day under a bridge, sixteen, no shoes, no where to go, cold, Old Crow for antifreeze, I found hope for us all in a poem.
It was Bukowski’s “Maybe Will See”. It was an unassuming poem but it summed up the modern world that wanted me to jump of this bridge after I was done with my libation. I had read Charles before and like most kids, identified with him. But he never gave me hope, he only confirmed my apathy. But he wrote this poem as a older man, my old man. He was leaving his mindset of a drunken blue-collar worker teetering between nihilism and nirvana. Instead, Charles was entering a state of reflection and cautious optimism. He no longer wanted to point out the pointless; he wanted to impart wisdom into the world, to me. I needed to be lifted from under, like Persephone. The poem opened with one of humankind’s greatest endeavor, and a modern boys canvas, space. Charles was born in 1920 and he saw my angry empty womb unfold; spewing shinny slugs of plastics, televisions, and computers to the moon. His poem did not give a fuck about the details of cosmology; he only glosses over them, reality was the metaphor. What was important for him, was not the mass paradigm shift from our caveman’s fear of change, a hungry Cronus, to man as Prometheus unchained, dissecting with sight. The use of the new goals like the moon was to distracted us from a 19th century that killed god, his corpse the infinite vacuum of space. We are not genetically predisposed to shoot for the moon, but it keeps us from doing bad things to ourselves, like macaroni art for the insane. This poem is about humanity’s need to escape from itself so it does not do self-inflicted damage. He was a hopeful parent of a thin blue heroin addict, he administered methadone as a still born eucharist. Man needs to channel his infinite violent energies into something mysterious and infinite like the universe, sexy isn‘t it.
Bukowski showed me a dichotomy of humanity in this poem; he shows a curious inventive side and a war-like, suicidal, and destructive side, Charles, like all men and women of his age, had lived to see war after war and many innovations, and he prefers our preoccupation with innovation to war. Seeing new shiny things replaces man’s ever-acute nihilism with curiosity.
The title “Maybe Will See” has a desperate optimism to it. He believes our growing understanding of the universe is a distraction from doing bad, but he leaves another avenue slightly open what if humanity does finds something? He gave me a glimmer of hope and maybe my distraction turns out to be the Holy Grail. I new from that day that teleological bullshit is better then being eaten by the vultures of apathy. My belly button healed over and I knew then I was my own mother and father. I was nameless on the edge of the Dao.