PSH Prompts |
Charles Bukowski road not chosen PSH while reading Charles Bukowski poetry on the metro ride home listening to Buddha bar music on my oh-too-hip iPod I begin to see myself as I was over 30 years ago when I was merely a bit player a minor character in a Charles Bukowski poem a wild young underemployed intellectual hanging out in dismal bars and dives all over asia and California hanging with disreputable women and drunks and drinkers and characters out of his kinds of haunts a mad poet bard of the underground a drunken poet in a drunken bum show that nightly played in his head then one day I met the woman of my dreams and went down a different path a long slow path to respectability and now 30 years later I am no longer a wild man I am still a poet at heart but I am now also a bureaucrat in a button-down suite doing the people's business working for the government I've become the man sometimes I wonder would I have been better off going down that other path would I have ended up somewhere else doing something else would I have been as happy would I have been as successful? No answer satisfies the longing in my heart for that wild thing that still lurks beneath it's a civilized cover and I know that I am still a mad poet at heart railing against the injustice of the world as I work day by day in the belly of the great beast of state I recall the ancient Chinese saying, "Confucian during the day while Taoist rebel at night" playing out in my head and nightly dreams in the true American upper-class patrician tradition I close the book and look out the window get off the train, and walk slowly home and realize I had no choice but to take the path that I''ve trodden on and so I put aside my misgivings and say goodbye to my "Bukowski" desires for another night of domestic contentment was it worth it all to take the conventional path and not take the bohemian road to hell and back I look at my wife and realize I had no choice, had no choice but to follow her to the ends of the earth and beyond by her side as we walked our path of shared destiny goodbye Charles Bukowski wherever you are may I meet you in a bar in the next life and figure out where we should have gone until then the drinks are on me. “If I had…” or roads not taken. Write a poem imagining/focussing on how your life or your subject’s life could have been changed or become different if one decision had been made that was different from what happened. What risks did you take or avoid? What benefits came your way or did you miss out on? Examples: what if you had married the first person you loved or who loved you? What if the hitchhiking ride you and a buddy took turned bad rather than being the lark it was? What if you hadn’t accepted that job in another city but decided to stay put? What if you had not blown up at a social event and been shunned after that by people who had counted as your friends? If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the poetry super highway Facebook group. #napowrimo #poetry April 11, 2023: poetry writing prompt from ed meek |