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Friday, March 04, 2011

Ode To The Manly Scribes



An homage to Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson, manly scribes who, in the end, flinched in their fear and loathings as humans do.

by James Jarvis
02/23/05

The German
with animal crackers in his soup
moved on
to the great surprise
long ago . . .
as has the man who did everything
standing . . .
even writing,
especially writing.

They were both acidic
in their way,
writers with the hard eyes
of stone cutters.
Both took their lives:
one shotgun fast
and one shotglass slow;
Ernest and Charles,
but this last one,
old and become irrelevant,
Dewey Decimal systemed
but relegated to the back dusty shelves;
Hunter,
surprised me,
marked a passage of my life
harder
with his gunpowder out.

How could he do this to me?
How could he mark
my passage into 50
with gunfire?
with the indubitable finality
of a bullet?

I guess becoming irrelevant is a big deal
if one was as relevant
as these dry-eyed,
unflinching
scribes were.
I've never been relevant,
so I wouldn't know.

The great surprise:
in the end
these great, two-fisted
manly men . . .
flinched.


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