Bukowski in Bronze

“we need our own newspaper”

–Charles Bukwoski’s “the weather’s been fair”

When my sister started her campaign

to build a statue of Hank for the locals

to know their neighbor was a writer

and tourists to have something to look at

besides his headstone--lying flat like

all the dead, to be towered over

by a single traffic cone--the closest thing

to a Pedro paper said don’t sanitize him

for tourist consumption; instead, pimp out

his image like they do with t-shirts

and posters even though he was uneasy

about his face, and his widow

doesn’t see a damn penny.

When my sister started her campaign,

she wasn’t a fan of Hank, but cried

cancer-filled tears at the request for miles

in exchange for inches. She wanted the one

statue and was countered with a list of

should-be statues and parks and museums

and how-to-go-about-its with stickers

and shirts the widow and Hank wouldn’t

approve of, and you need approval from

the sideshow act to make a couple pennies

off their alligator-face. Drive down Pacific,

past Slavko’s giant chicken and see the local

paper posterize Hank on their storefront

window, bigger than his life and with a factoid

impossible to prove but for one posed picture.

When my sister died, Bukowski in Bronze

probably went with her because Pedro wanted

an army of statues and for one radiation-weak

woman to read, remember, and build them

without hosing them down to see how memory

is like property already staked, claimed, gated.