Poetry by Larry Schug

               ​Dan Keck CC



Maybe We Wanted to be Bukowski

Francis Hotel
343 Peachtree Street
Atlanta, where the fuck else,
fourth floor, or maybe fifth,
can’t remember, doesn’t matter,
torn down now, anyhow.
 
A couple junkies,
shootin’ up whatever they could get
took us in,
we took it, took to it,
and it took us.
 
We started for the music,
Aretha, James Brown, Otis,
our hands performing a ritual
with a spoon,  a candle, a needle,
somehow akin to fingers on strings,
the precision in their movement
as we tied a shoelace around our biceps,
skipping prelude for the rush of crescendo.
 
We were already dead,
though we thought we were alive,
like a radio must think it lives
when the music plays,
kicked to death by that skinny as a needle
white horse with one eye
that took our blood then gave it back loaded.
 
But we wanted to be Bukowski
though  we’d never read him.
And the thing is
I don’t think Bukowski would give a fuck.
He’d say, Don’t blame me.
We all do what we do.
It’s all just one god damn poem anyway.
Who the hell do you think is gonna read
much less remember the words?​

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Larry Schug is retired after a life of various kinds of physical labor.  He has published eight books of poems, the latest being " A Blanket of Raven Feathers" with North Star Press.  He hopes to return to tutoring at the  College of St. Benedict writing center and as a volunteer naturalist at Outdoor U., an environmental education center at St. John's (Minnesota) University next fall if the pandemic allows.

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