Poetry by Michael Estabrook |

(Charles Bukowski
would’ve been proud)


She continues “and if it weren’t
for me you’d be a damn
drunk out on the street someplace living
one of those lost lives” and stomps
out of the room. I follow right
along behind indignant as hell
“what are you talking about I
don’t drink that much, a little wine,
a few bottles of beer now
and then. I’m not as bad as you
like to think you women always want
to believe you’re saving our fucking
souls.” So then a week later
my brother Todd comes to town for
the first time in five years and we
(Charles Bukowski would’ve been
proud) stop at all the package
stores and bars along the route home
from the airport, even take bottles
of beer with us on our walks
through the park and on the
railroad tracks over the next two
days. I hate it, don’t
you just hate it, that my wife always
has to be right.







A CHAIR OR A LAMP

Doesn’t matter what I say, ever.
At work, the young know-it-all,
workaholic micromanaging boss couldn’t
care less about what the voice of experience
has to say, he can do it all himself,
needs no one else to get the work done.
I might as well be yelling underwater.
And my children (bless their sweet hearts)
treat me like a Neanderthal grand-elder,
limping around in the back of the cave,
fighting the dogs for scraps of food.
And my brother promised me 5 times
he’d email this important (to me) url,
but mustn’t have heard my plea,
he simply cannot get it done.
And my wife, after we had our children,
has found little need for me for anything,
certainly nothing I have to say
is worth listening to,
I might as well be a chair or a lamp.


















Michael Estabrook is a medievalist at heart (and by training) disappointed (though reconciled) with the modern world, particularly with the materialism and mercantilism bludgeoning life, smashing our brains into the ground, our hearts into dust. He’s still hoping to find a true and meaningful “cause” in life, other than scratching out his pale poetic murmurings like trying to write in hardened concrete. But he needs to find his “cause” pretty soon before he turns to dust himself.