Poetry
I’ve got to be honest. I can
make good word music and rhyme
at the right times and fit words
together to give people pleasure
and even sometimes take their
breath away – but it always
somehow turns out kind of phoney.
Consonance and assonance and inner
rhyme won’t make up for the fact
that I can’t figure out how to get
down on real paper the real or the true
which we call life. Like the other
day. The other day I was walking
on the lower exercise yard here
at San Quentin and this cat called
Turk came up to a friend of mine
and said Ernie, I hear you’re
shooting on my kid. And Ernie
told him So what, punk? And Turk
pulled out his stuff and shanked
Ernie in the gut only Ernie had a
Metal tray in his shirt. Turk’s
shank bounced right off him and
Ernie pulled his stuff out and of
course Turk didn’t have a tray and
caught it dead in the chest, a bad
one, and the blood that came to his
lips was a bright pink, lung blood,
and he just laid down in the grass
and said Shit. Fuck it. Sheeit.
Fuck it. And he laughed a long
time, softly, until he died. Now
what could consonance or assonance or
even rhyme do to something like that?
____________________
W I L L I A M W A N T L I N G
Charles Bukowski on William Wantling
