Bukowski's Last Poem

No thoughts of racetracks
or booze on your deathbed.
No final hour rantings nor cats tearing
your cold flesh, starved and mad for food
as you prophesied. Instead, a poem written.

No miraculous conversions, no slitting
of wrists, no poison like Vachel. No mention
Of Jeffers, Soroyan or Hemingway who you
were as good as more than once.

That poem mentions how a tree moves
even as a man waits to die or live. No goodbyes
to mad women or those young girls in short skirts.
So young, roses are formed from the tips of their
breasts and silk curtains lay between their naked thighs
fluttering with innocent menace,

Just a poem, of how young you had once been.

Buk, you despised mediocrity and all who feared death
or lived without magic. So you wrote poems
brutal as maimed butchers delicate as child prodigies.
Delicate as a dying man writing poems I'll miss,
For the way they waved an angry fist at a world
that deserves it and more.

Buk, goodnight, sleep with the darkest angels.
Me, I’m sending out for beer and fried chicken.