Finding the Night

Well if you are not here I am.
And so is your insistent voice saying
"Remember to feel with both sides"

I am.

Just checked out a piece by
Clarissa Pinkola Estes on
The Moderate Voicewebsite
about night bloggers.
About writing at night. Living at night.
She quotes Bukowski.
Reprints a poem, in fact.
A good poem.

I checked out a tarot card reading before I found the link above.
It sounded like Obama. I asked about career.
Change. Be the harbinger of change. Dare to wake up first.
Something or someone is coming to answer you.
You are meant to lead if you are courageous enough to live your love.

All this, and you aren't here to answer.
Or are you?

Do you know how much I adore the long magical spaces between 2 am, say, and dawn?
There is a sacredness in the stillness of the early nightlike morning.
I need more of that life.

How do you fit that into 9-5?

Wasn't Bukowski a postman? And Pinkola Estes works a "day job" and then comes home
to herself and her night rides. And at my day job, the interminable temp assignment, a kind insurance man suggested The NightHawks as good blues.

So Thank you ma'am, and ma'am and sirs.

The inner naval officer is forced to admit that he signed up so that he could have
those long night watches alone to himself in the middle of the ocean.

The panel points out that navigating from one's computer is already possible.
And perhaps the inner naval offer should just start telling her sea stories instead
of going back to school. The inner naval officer is willing to listen.

one thirty-six a.m.
by Charles Bukowski

I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky…
or Hamsun…
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.
Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk
and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.
Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window,
looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today,
I won’t have to make any more
visits there.
When I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill…
it’s those who don’t pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Céline walks back,
sits down at the machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.
Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
He sits down, begins to type.
He doesn’t know what a writer’s block is…
he’s a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
He types away.
and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls,
these dirty yellow and blue walls
…my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.
he’s not alone tonight
and
neither am I.

Charles Bukowski “one thirty-six a.m.”
©All Rights Reserved
Bukowski b 1920, d. 1994