II was sitting on the toilet
In my dirty apartment
I was wiping my ass with my left hand
As the Prophet decrees
And smoking a cigar with my right
And this made me think of Bukowski
And there he was!
Laying on the cold tile floor
Waiting for his chance to puke

“What the fuck are you looking at?!”
He barked
“You have no right to judge me.
You don’t work hard enough.
You don’t get drunk enough.
You write too many goddamn rhyming poems!”

I told him I didn’t mean to stare
But it was amazing to see him again.

“You ain’t shittin’ it’s amazing,”
Buk burped
“Just try and get T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost
To appear on demand. Fat chance!”

He snatched my stogie from me

“We miss you, Buk,”
I said
“There’s nobody else like you
To show us how to go on.”

“Aw, Christ!”
Hank spat
“You whine like such a woman,
I expected there to be cute lace panties
Twisted around your ankles there.”

His head was ringed with cigar smoke

“Same things that could bring me back
From the beyond is what keeps you going.
Booze, pussy and a little music on the radio.”

He flicked the cigar butt at my feet

“Now can you get off the crapper
And give somebody else a chance?!”

David Lawton was a finalist for the 2010 Arts & Letters Prize for Poetry. He is a graduate of the theatre program at Boston University. In January 2009 he was a featured reader for Downtown Does Huncke For His Birthday, an event he both co-produced and co-hosted.