Poverty
it is the man you’ve never seen who
keeps you going,
the one who might arrive
someday.
he isn’t out on the streets or
in the buildings or in the
stadiums,
or if he’s there
I’ve missed him somehow.
he isn’t one of our presidents
or statesmen or actors.
I wonder if he’s there.
I walk down the streets
past drugstores and hospitals and
theatres and cafes
and I wonder if he is there.
I have looked almost half a century
and he has not been seen.
a living man, truly alive,
say when he brings his hands down
from lighting a cigarette
you see his eyes
like the eyes of a tiger staring past
into the wind.
but when the hands come down
it is always the
other eyes
that are there
always always.
and soon it will be too late for me
and I will have lived a life
with drugstores, cats, sheets, saliva,
newspapers, women, doors and other assortments,
but nowhere
a living man.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
