Crunching down the soggy North Beach alley
2 am Frisco fog overhead
drunken old bum pissing on the grimy wall.
I was going to walk on
but the sound of his stream
triggered my own beer-filled bladder
What the hell, I thought
and joined him at the wall,
as if at an old Paris pissoir.
So two drunks,
one old, one getting there fast
My feet spread wide so as not to get splashed,
I blurt: “Did you know this alley is named for a famous writer?”
He looked over at me
as if this was an everyday setting for small talk
“Oh yeah?” Who that?”
“Jack Kerouac,” I answer. “The 'King of the Beats.'”
“Hunh,” he grunted, shaking himself off. “Never heard of the shithead.”
“Good for you,” I said. “He never heard of you either.”
“Maybe so, who gives a damn,” he belched.
“How about this,” I continued,
“This wall we're pissing on belongs to a famous bookstore,
owned by a famous poet.”
“And who's that?”
He didn't sound interested.
“Lawrence Ferlinghetti,” I replied. “The Poet Laureate of San Francisco.”
“Hmmph,” he mumbled, zipping. “Never heard of him either. But you know what?”
“What?” I said, finishing too.
“Great poets die in steaming pots of shit.”
I had no reply to that.
He grunted again and walked towards Chinatown.
I went the other way
The bookstore was still open
Nothing else to do, I went in.
Forty years too late,
beatniks sat scribbling in the dim light
too cheap to buy anything.
Drunk young professionals,
losers in the nightly meat market,
kicked out of the bars at closing time
but afraid to go home alone
nodded off against bookshelves.
All surrounded by a million words going unmolested.
On a strange unbidden whim,
I went looking:
Auden, Bowles, Brautigan...
Bukowski: “Tales of Ordinary Madness.”
Sounds familiar, I thought,
and sat down to read, too cheap to buy
and there on the Contents page:
“Great Poets Die In Steaming Pots of Shit.”
“Aha,” I said aloud:
“Fooled me, old bastard.”
LATE ADDENDUM: John Martin, RIP.
This poem, scribbled on a board meeting agenda one night while bored and drinking wine, won the Black Sparrow Charles Bukowski Memorial Poetry Contest in 1999, conducted and judged by John Martin, publisher of Black Sparrow books. I found the contest announcement in San Francisco’s fabled City Lights books on my way to the meeting. Martin had “sponsored“ the then-mostly-unknown cult writer Bukowski in the late 1960s, paying him a nominal monthly fee to quit his post office job and just write, giving Martin publishing rights. It was a good gamble for them both; “We made each other rich,” he later said.
I gave the announcement to my friend Len Finocchio (of the famed North Beach nightclub and Anderson Valley family) and he won too!
Martin had moved up to a spread outside Santa Rosa and invited us to Copperfield’s Books there to read our now award-winning poems (in front of a big crowd, which was nerve-wracking for an amateur poet), have a nice dinner, and collect our checks: I think mine was for $250 and when he presented it he said “At this moment you are the highest-paid poet in America!” I still have the official t-shirt too.
He struck us as a very cool guy, and his admiring NYTimes obit is here:
John Martin, Devoted Publisher of Literary Rebels, Dies at 94
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/books/john-martin-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WE8.Xp-Y.I8PivL300IFu&smid=url-share
(As for me, I’ve never entered another poetry contest, knowing it would be all downhill from there….)
-SH