issue62whitmanandbuk

                                                              ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM

***BIO*** Bradley Mason Hamlin lives in Sacramento, California. His poetry, short stories, and articles have appeared in several small press books, magazines, and literary journals in print and on line. Brad & his wife Nicky own Mystery Island Publications and publish an ongoing in-print literary pop culture magazine called: Mystery Island Magazine. Recent work includes the editing and formatting of Tough Company by singer/songwriter Tom Russell, featuring: Charles Bukowski. Brad is also the creator of the metaphysical crime series: Monster Zipper, featuring the Intoxicated Detective. For more information about Hamlin and other wild things—visit: www.mysteryisland.net

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WHITMAN & BUKOWSKI

by Bradley Mason Hamlin

Alex Adams and Ed Fudd left the poetry reading after scaring a few people with their “verse” and wandered through midtown Sacramento to a local bar called the Zebra Club, a true hellhole of a watering hole, small, crowded and usually filled with frat boys wearing soft shirts stretched out over puffed up chests. The women that gave themselves to these creeps smelled like sugar and gasoline and had what looked like paper-cuts for eyes.

But the bar existed somewhere in between Alex and Ed’s point A and point B, and well, “So be it,” they said.
Alex and Ed elbowed their way to the bar counter and ordered boilermakers. “Every time,” Alex said, “I read my goddamned poetry I wonder why the hell I bother. What makes a grown person get up in front of a bunch of drunken monkeys or clowns way too sober and read broken lines of blood script?”

“Poetry,” said Ed. “I was great. They love me.”

“You’re all right,” said Alex, “if people can stomach hearing the same goddamned poem over and over …”

“Revision,” said Ed. “I gotta revise, keep it modern.”

“I don’t like poets,” Alex said, “and I really don’t like the crowds poets draw.”

“Whitman,” said Ed.

Alex laughed. “Whitman and Bukowski were both wrong. Whitman said great audiences bring great poetry and Bukowski argued great poetry would bring great audiences. Bullshit both times.”

“I saw Bukowski,” said Ed, “here in a bar in Sacramento,” he said. “Bukowski said he fucked Anne Menebroker.”

“Who’s she?” Alex asked.

“Poet,” said Ed.

“And?”

“He said her pussy stinks worse than her poetry.”

Alex laughed. “And yet he came up from L.A. to fuck her. There isn’t a poet alive that doesn’t have brain damage.”

“I’ve published the same poem in nine different magazines,” Ed said.

Alex finished his beer with the shot floating in the middle. “Hard to participate in something,” he said, “to make it a part of your life when you don’t feel a brotherhood connection to the surroundings and the people who populate those surroundings. The comic book people make me feel the same way. Love visual art creations of all kinds, from mainstream to the underground crap, but just can’t stand the crowd that gathers at the conventions.”

“My poem,” said Ed, “is about dinosaurs, but it’s modern.”

“I must be cracked in the head, too,” said Alex, “subnormal or something. Anyone who finds fault with everyone else is obviously ipso facto fucked up himself, and the third strike comes with this goddamned bar crowd.

“Hate them too.”

The club smelled of vomit and uninspiring perfumes as a skinny effeminate guy with long fingers dropped quarters inside the jukebox and shook his ass. Alex and Ed did their best not to spill the boilermakers that took so long for the bartender to remember how to make as the body parts bumped, giggled, and jabbed from all sides. After a few shindig songs, Ed said, “Shut that thing up, ya fuckin limp dick nigger! Tear your queer head off!”

Rank whiskey, before the reading whiskey, from the pit-bottom of Fudd’s gut, echoed up out of the would-be poet’s mouth, forcing patrons out of the way as he screamed, “No reality mother-fuck assholes!”

“Leave him alone,” said Alex. “He ain’t doin anything.”

“Fuckin limp dick nigger!” said Ed. “Gonna kick his fuckin ass!”

“Because he’s black?” asked Alex, “or because he’s queer?”

“Yeah,” said Ed. He stood up from the bar. “Queer nigger!”

Alex grabbed Ed’s arm, turned him around, and pushed him toward the door. “Goddamnit,” he said. “What’s wrong with you? Let’s go outside. You wanna fight somebody—fight me.”

Ed Fudd’s fist slammed into Alex Adams’s nose. Alex flew back and landed on the grass. Blood flowed out of his nose. He shook it off and stood up. He could feel the blood dripping down his face and past his lips as the adrenaline rushed through his body and eased the pain. A poem written in plasma, he thought.

Alex wiped at his nose with his palm, took a good glop of goo and wiped it onto Fudd’s right cheek.

“Here’s your poem,” he said. “Revise that.”

“What?” Fudd said. “What’s the problem? I thought we were squaring off.”

Alex looked around at the crowd that had gathered to watch, and he wondered as the blood fell onto his shirt whether it was Whitman’s crowd that had inspired the violence or Bukowski’s that had simply come to watch.

April 2006