F O C U S

In past writing for E:Z ANGST, I focused deeply on the theory of change and how it can affect our lives and our writing - maybe I gave it a bad name. I mean, everything is about perspective - your life is in turmoil and you are simply glad to see the sun rise consistently every day, but when you life is stable, at a standstill, the sunrise is just another reminder of the fact that every day is really the same day and nothing changes - and when nothing changes - people grow too comfortable, and complacency is like poison to the mind -

With lack of change comes want, desire for adventure, anarchy, and depending on your personality type, paranoia.

So, I ask myself - what do I want? Well, The grass is always greener -

Waiting in the lonely room
for someone
but for nothing
but a weak distraction
a spark, a wet match

a second of fire
smile red lips
white teeth
flat stomach
wish and dream on that spark
a fool wrapped in foolish and fleshy desire
a perfect escape from that lonely room
emanating with mechanical transistor dreams
crowded but filled with emptiness
black holes where the eyes should be

I hear futuristic sounds
and my chest reaches
swells and caves
breathing nothing
I have learned to breath nothing and live

and wait
for another knock
another night
and another lottery sleep

in hope that the sun
will be different tomorrow -

C H A R L E S - B U K O W S I

With that in mind, as always, I will now segue into my featured writer of the month: Charles Bukowsi, who, of all people, was a victim of his own stagnancy.

Many people will not necessarily agree with my perception of the meaning of his work - which I believe paints a raw and honest image, or tells a story if you will of an ordinary life and the anguish that colorless existence can bring to a poets soul - Charles writes about ordinary subjects exactly as they are - ordinary - but seems to pick up an angles of these stories that seldom told by the "ordinary man"

Charles picks the extraordinary out of the ordinary - such as the way light reflects off of a woman's not so perfect body, making it perfect, if only for a moment, or the way the wind blows a strangers skirt, bringing an instant of intimacy into light as he watches her disappear around a street corner, and the ugliness of a beautiful woman rushing to a mirror to check her lipstick - Charles has a quality that many lack, that is to simply survive in the ugliness, the plain, and make it sparkle for moment - which, by the way, is a great cure or writer's block -

There will be a place where the sun does nothing but scrutinize and burn, the landscape never shifts and you find you are lost and complacent in a world full of apathetic smiles - and then, only then will you see those desperate angles that only flash for a moment, and you can capture them, with your pen.