I’m happy to see “Indiscreet Charade” & “Ode to Bukowski” in Unlikely Stories Six. Many thanks to Jonathan Penton & everyone at Unlikely Stories for providing a home for my once nomadic poems.
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I became a Cary Grant fan as a teen. On days that I’d stay home from school with—kaff, kaff—a case of the sniffles, his movies often aired as a welcome breather to sappy soaps & lame game shows, back then the mainstay of daytime TV. Even if the movie sucked—& to be sure, some did—you couldn’t blame Grant. His character portrayals, whatever the storyline, whether comedic or dramatic, all seemed vaguely modified versions of his on-screen persona, the always affable Cary Grant, replete with quirky accent. Fittingly, in The Elegant Universe, physicist Brian Greene cites Grant as an example of string theory—the selfsame person, albeit with various names & histories, existing simultaneously in a superabundance of alternate universes. OK, I really don’t know if Greene gives Grant a shout-out in the book, but damn it, he should have.
“Indiscreet Charade” takes its title from two Grant movies. (Pop quiz: Name both films—one point each, maximum score two.) Actually, the poem has little to nothing to do with either per se. It’s more about, at least ostensibly, shticky Cary Grant impersonations—like the one a wren rendered repeatedly while I stared blankly into the apocryphal void of existence. Although I doubt anyone finds it particularly surprising that Grant never said “Judy, Judy, Judy” in any known venue, that it is complete & utter nonsense, what may blow your freaking mind—I know it does mine—is that, by all accounts, in the unreal psychedelic world of the past century, somehow hip psychiatrists prescribed mellow yellow dots & doses of California Sunshine in a highly “experimental” therapy for rich, trippy patients such as Grant. That’s Hollywood, I guess they’d say, whoever they are, though in light of the surfeit of flicks produced as thinly veiled vehicles for pro-government propaganda, they’re probably feds.
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Charles Bukowski once compared writing poetry to taking a shit. I don’t remember the exact quotation. An internet search will supply a shitload (pardon the pun, mum) of quotes attributed to Bukowski that I haven’t the time or inclination to confirm the accuracy of, but I remember hearing Bukowski's shitty analogy (another pun, no apologies) many years ago, long before the internet, when I was still a young poet with but a handful of publications under my belt, which, in retrospect, probably wasn't the best place to put them. This holds doubly true in re: revolvers.
I saw Bukowski as sort of the Howard Stern of poetry (so not as stupid), thriving on shock & schlock. Bukowski's wont to dub himself the only one who knew shit about poetry arose—at least it seemed to me & fyi, I minored in psychology at college—in equal parts frustration, resentment, & ego in a vain (I’m full of puns) attempt to garner attention. To be fair, a generous dose of ego isn't necessarily a bad thing. Think of Ted Williams allegedly swinging his mighty ash as he lumbered through the locker room before a game, proclaiming, “I’m Ted fucking Williams, the best fucking hitter in all of baseball!” Then bang! he’d bash a locker with his bat or maybe smash a cooler—again, allegedly. Even a cursory glance at Williams's lifetime stats may suggest his pregame ritual, if true, paid wicked dividends, though now, alas, his physical assets lie frozen in limbo.
For what it’s worth, I like Bukowski, but I don’t love him. He wrote some good poems, some very good indeed, but he also wrote buttloads of bad ones, as well as a great many others in need of revision. In time, I’d come to regard his veritable catalog of provocative statements as “Bukowski-isms” to make of what you will—until a few years back when what I thought would be a rather uneventful morning shit proved otherwise. Rising from my self-anointed throne, I beheld an incredible miniature facsimile of Venice, “the masque of Italy,” in the porcelain, the tiny Ty-D-Bol gondolier oaring through the dirty blue stream, strains of Gerusalemme Liberata echoing down the old crapper. No hyperbole! I chuckled, recalling the advice often given to encourage writers to write every day, even when uninspired, because you never know until you sit down what will come out. Then it hit me—maybe Bukowski was onto something after all.
I offer “Ode to Bukowski” as an apology.
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