hi friends and strangers! my next show will be a small cosy affair celebrating famed author CHARLES BUKOWSKI, a “laureate of American lowlife” (quoted by Time magazine, 1986).

super honored to be part of this alongside local street artist SpeakCryptic!
i’ll be showing a couple of new drawings and some old works custom made for Bukowski in the lo-fi space…

for  those unfamiliar with Bukowski, here’s an archive of his works. amazing stuff, i think if you like my art, you would love him!

it’s on TODAY, 28th of September, 8.30pm at 15 Minutes Cafe over at LaSalle College of the Arts. (facebook event page)
i’ll be there for a little while, so if you got a bit of time, come on down to revel in the Bukowski and say hi!

an almost made up poem

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

one thirty-six a.m.

I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Celine at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.

Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.

Celine stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today, I won't have to make any more
visits there.
when I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill;
it's those who don't pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Celine walks back, sits down at the
machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.

Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
he sits down, begins to type.
he doesn't know what a writer's block
is:
he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
he types away.

and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls, these
dirty yellow and blue walls
my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.

he's not alone tonight
and neither am
I.

those girls we followed home

in junior high the two prettiest girls were
Irene and Louise,
they were sisters;
Irene was a year older, a little taller
but it was difficult to choose between
them;
they were not only pretty but they were
astonishingly beautiful
so beautiful
that the boys stayed away from them;
they were terrified of Irene and
Louise
who weren't aloof at all;
even friendlier than most
but
who seemed to dress a bit
differently than the other girls;
they always wore high heels'
silk stockings,
blouses,
skirts,
new outfits
each day;
and'
one afternoon
my buddy, Baldy, and i followed them
home from school;
you see, we were kind of
the bad guys on the grounds
so it was
more or less
expected,
and
it was soomething:
walking along ten or twelve feet behind them;
we didnt say anything
we just followed
watching
their voultuous swaying,
the balance of the
haunches.

we liked it so much that we
followed them home from school
every
day.

when they'd go into their house
we'd stand outside on the sidewalk
smoking cigarettes and talking.

"someday". I told Baldy.
"they are going to invite us inside their
house and they are going to
fuck us."

"you really think so?"

"sure."

now
50 years later
I can tell you
they never did
-never mind all the stories we
told the guys;
yes, it's a dream that
keepds you going
then and
now.

source: bukowski.org.ua (go there for more bukowski goodness!)