Fred Voss
Kafka and Coleridge and Bukowski and Me
As I shoved a 20-foot bar of steel into the mouth of a blast furnace
K.
kept hearing static on the phone every time he called
the castle
in Kafka’s novel I read in my cheap apartment
after I was done working at the steel mill.
K couldn’t seem to get anywhere near that castle
where he was supposed to have a job and Bukowski
wanted to kneel before flowers
in terrible hangover as
my seared nostrils stank of steel dust
and the fumes
of burning oil and sizzling welding rods
and Coleridge
was still addicted to laudanum and failing
to fulfill his genius potential as I dragged
the steel toes of my boots across concrete floors
shaking with the pounding of machines and hammers the tin walls
rattled with the buzz
of roaring compressors and 200 motors
pummelling my heart with shock wave
as Bukowski waited to die
in New Orleans and I turned the pages of books
with fingers blackened by the filthy skin of steel bars
and Coleridge gave lectures
instead of finishing Kubla Khan
and I looked out the windows of the steel mill
and my cheap apartment
with nothing to hang onto but bars of steel
and a few books
as I tried somehow to claw my way toward my first poem
and Kafka
kept ringing the castle.
Fred Voss has a new machinist job at a 100-year-old factory in downtown L.A., not far from where Charles Bukowski worked in the Post Office and John Fante lived on Bunker Hill writing Ask the Dust. His latest collection, Carnegie Hall with Tin Walls, is available from Bloodaxe.
Page(s) 29
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