A deal is a deal is a deal is a deal

"A deal is a deal, right?"

Too ashamed to ask outloud and exclaim there
was some kind of promise involved,
a stranger sweats in between breaths to make
sure this was the actual place and time.
He was right, but now you don't feel much
like singing, and how fucking foolish
to depend on promises made in bars,
every scathing character there banished from
some other place, including yourself,
unwilling to commit to anything other than
staying alive the next morning, and perhaps
not even that.

I imagine Charles Bukowski sitting at decrepit
wooden counters in some no-name cities
with old whores, chugging straight alcohol
and choking on those few swigs that would
happen to diverge into pipes not meant for
anything stronger than pure oxygen.
"When it gets down to the nitty gritty, fuck 'em,"
some middle-aged man would slur,
pounding out life lessons like hes lived 80 years in 39,
crying five minutes later on whores shoulders
and getting written about by the richest
barfly in town.
Even Bukowski had to go home and
detox in reality,
next time bringing the bar with him alone on stage,
puking into the metal trash can propped up against his empty desk
and continuing his conceptualized hatred of humanity,
he, himself living a long life only to lay there dying
of something other than the ravage of whiskey
or too many cigarettes.

The man next to me spits when he talks,
and when he says he doesn't give a shit about anybody
he wails about his girlfriend in the same breath,
"She knows I love her to death," I overhear him say,
"but that's all shes got."
That's all shes got.
That's all that woman has got,
him loving her to death,
nothing else?
I felt afraid for everything I loved and wondered
how much of it is enough
in these late nights that grow even later,
as though last call never comes, but
instead becomes a dusty, restless film.


I stared at that massive movie
screen and said,
"I was living that fucking life"
and that is when it all finally felt real.