Welcome to another wonderful Open Link Night – this time in the week when we spill poetry all over the place and enjoy reading each other’s work.

My name is Claudia Schönfeld and oh I fell in love with poetry – head over heals about one and a half years ago…this is why I‘m here and this is what keeps me reading and writing.. nothing else.. It‘s a kind of love I can‘t fully explain, some sort of magic when the words form on the page and this staccato heartbeat which beds me somewhere between awe & thunderstorm, vulnerability and wild desire – always hungry for more.

I also fell in love with Bukowski, this was about a year ago when i stumbled upon the poem below…the first poem I read by him..and I wept madly because it touched me somewhere I couldn’t locate exactly. Bukowski says: “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

When I read poetry I want to see through the poem like through binoculars and I want to see LIFE, I want to feel the pulse of the poet and the time, I want to smell the sweat and pain and joy, hanging on the words – nothing more, nothing less..

Thought I‘d share this first Bukowski poem with you and then.. Poets… let‘s have a great time out on the trail, enjoying each other‘s work and celebrating poetry..

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An Almost Made Up Poem
by Charles Bukowski

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

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Here’s how it works…

• Post a poem to your blog,
• Link your poem to dVerse (1 link, please) by clicking on the Mr.Linky button below.
• This opens a new screen where you’ll enter your information, and where you also choose links to read. Once you have pasted your poem’s blog url and entered your name, click Submit.
• Don’t forget to let your readers know where you’re linking up and encourage them to participate by including a link to dVerse in your blog post.
• Visit others who have linked and leave comments to let them know what you appreciate about their poem or how it affected you.
• Spread the word on the poems you enjoy if you’d like. Feel free to tweet and share on the social media of your choice.
• Enjoy being part of this community.

Have a great time everyone!
~ Claudia