Bukowski said that there was everything and nothing.

BUKOWSKI BY CRISTINA CARTER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE  ISSUE 47

Bukowski 

said that there was everything

and nothing

for the grocery clerk

for me

everything and nothing

and nothing

and nothing

I am a blank page

empty

as the people standing before me

I touch

their beer

their overripe tomatoes

their money covered in blood or shit

their money pulled from their bra

wet

from a muggy Sacramento July

empty

as the woman before me

thinking of spreading her legs

on the American river

nothing and nothing

as I clock in

at 3am

crisp air and solitude

as I clock out at midnight

darkness and exhaustion

waiting and waiting

before the blank page

as I crumble underneath

the clown faces

of my managers

as they laugh at how

they make me dance

I want to watch

their jester faces

melting under broken bones

to do something

to have everything

but only nothing

to burn my lungs

with my third cigarette

to cover the smoke

with cold coffee

while I look at nothing

I want to eat the dirt

from your grave

I want to find your words

and spit them out

//

CRISTINA CARTER

I’m a clerical worker for the State of California and a gas station attendant in Reno Nevada. Working two jobs doesn’t allow much free time but I make do. I go between Truckee California and South Reno. There is nothing more mystical than the fog sitting on the mountains in the morning.

I had a poem Baptism published in the Calaveras Station Literary Journal. This was at my alma mater California State University of Sacramento. After that life got in the way and I lost creativity. Which is where this poem came from. That place within me filled with frustration and creativity and disappointment and even anger. Being stuck between the place of wanting to write, having images play in your head, having words scream at you, and then it all disappears. When you finally get the words out you know deep down they aren’t right.

Bukowski’s poem Something For The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks, And You spoke to me at the same time I was working at the grocery store. I was thrilled to see him speaking about people, all types of people, hard-working, drunk, down-and-out people. People like me. This poem came out of an alien place inside of me. The place where we feel like we don’t belong. Being torn between two worlds, between people who won’t understand you. Only wanting something from you when you only want to be able to get out what you need to say. So during the cold wet Sacramento winter I wrote about the people I see every day at work, about the hot summers, about the emptiness I feel when I can’t write and about the emptiness I see in people around me.