He came up from a city that smelled like old grease,
pockets full of unpaid bills filling the holes.
Rain on the tenements, roofs bleeding cheap gold,
he kept his money under a mattress of poems.
Worked the graveyard ledger, stamped letters like confessions,
spit coffee into the sink and swore to the moon.
There was a thin bell of laughter where the music died,
and he kept writing like a man saving himself from sleep.

Whiskey and poems, cats on the sill,
he chased the edges of the world until the ink was still.
Whiskey and poems, cheap hotel room,
he coughed up his heart on a bar napkin one night.

Post office days and long-slit afternoons,
sorting other people's prayers into cardboard boxes.
He'd punch the clock, then punch the page with his fists,
turn the raw meat of living into lines that would hiss.
Women came like weather — some warm, some cruel, some kind,
left lipstick on the ashtray and stories in his mind.
He loved badly, laughed harder, watched the city bruise,
found saints in the gutters and angels in bad bars.

You could see the typewriter keys like teeth,
clacking out grudges and small miracles.
He fed the machine his nights and his hunger,
and sometimes the paper came back a prayer.

Whiskey and poems, cats on the sill,
he chased the edges of the world until the ink was still.
Whiskey and poems, cheap hotel room,
he coughed up his heart on a bar napkin one night.

They called him a drunk, they called him a prophet, same breath
a one-man parade of bruises and stubborn songs.
He slept on borrowed couches, woke with a grin like a bruise,
wrote love like a fist and hope like a cigarette ash.
When fame snuck in like a thief in a tuxedo suit,
he kept the old habits — whiskey, the type, the truth.
He'd raise a glass to the losers, wink at the gods,
say the only church he knew was the one without doors.

There are photographs with teeth missing, a hotel key,
and a cat licking the print of his palm.
Some nights he sounded like a city on its knees,
some nights like a boxer who’d finally found his feet.

Whiskey and poems, cats on the sill,
he chased the edges of the world until the ink was still.
Whiskey and poems, cheap hotel room,
he coughed up his heart on a bar napkin one night.

So if you ever find a poem in the gutter,
or a cigarette burned down to a memory,
raise it up, son, and don't be afraid —
somebody loved hard enough to write it away.

Track from the album "Tin-Cup Valentine", dedicated to Charles Bukowski

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