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Èos Una Poesia È Una Città ("A poem is a city")
Lyrics by Charles Bukowski (16 August 1920 – 9 March 1994)
Images by great850
A poem is a city
filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and ***,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of drought,
a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a city asking a clock
why,
a poem is a city burning,
a poem is a city under guns
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city where God rides naked through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away the flag;
a poem is a city of poets, most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter...
a poem is this city now,
50 miles from nowhere, 9:09 in the morning, the taste of liquor
and cigarettes, no police, no lovers, walking the streets,
this poem,
this city, closing its doors, barricaded, almost empty,
mournful without tears,
aging without pity, the hardrock mountains, the ocean
like a lavender flame,
a moon destitute of greatness,
a small music from broken windows...
a poem is a city, a poem is a nation, a poem is the world...
and now
I stick this under glass
for the mad editor's scrutiny,
the night is elsewhere and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on gallows as small men rant at things
they cannot do.