I wonder if I can find a picture
of Donna in a white "bossman" hardhat
presenting a chemical etch machine.
Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC).
Bad craziness.

I arrive at the booksALIVE 2006!
auditorium and set up my book-signing table.
When the door opens, readers will troop by
and stare at me. While I write a poem
in my head. About them.
Lord, how many novels did I write
sitting at my desk at Suent Scientific.

The years between 50 and 60 were good years,
for Bukowski, and the years between 60 and 70
were very good years. For me, the year between
66 and 67 was good. I cashed in my retirement
and gave myself a Last Ditch Attempt (LDA) grant.
I don't know if the year between 67 and 68 will be
a very good year, or I will be, not busted, so much as
reverted to my permanent rank: yardbird. If experience
is any guide, I'd predict the latter. Back in the shit.
Between en place and dans la merde, I am attracted to
the merde pole of the magnet. Homesick for the gutter.

I think what most people mean when they say
stream of consciousness is free association.
Their brains don't make the same connections
mine does, they don't make the same leap,
I was lucky to find someone who did,
we could complete each other's sentences,
like the two potheads in Honeysuckle Rose,
or Songwriter, who communicated in sentence
fragments, shrugs, like, you know, I thought
I'd write a book called SALVAGE ARCHEO-
LOGIST, about a dig I was on, the people I dug with,
who was fucking whom, employment-wise, and who
was being fucked. Us. Maybe I'd called it DEMO-
LITION LABORER, because we made less money,
with college degrees and several years of field experience,
than a green helper on a construction crew throwing scrap
into a front-end-loader, but why do that when the acquisitions editor
at the publishing house is like the careerist in the Division of Historic
Sites and Properties who called what we were doing scientific research
to get the grant, and so is the book reviewer at the newspaper. What's the use?
The use is it's what I do. What I do is who I am. I can't let them nullify me.
I subtitled my next book, UNTITLED, A LIFE UNDER ERASURE (SOUS RATURE).
They're trying to wash us away. Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.