the outlaw poetry network

Friday, July 31st, 2009...11:09 am

gary goude | jake’s dream

JAKE’S DREAM

Shit
me and Jake
we’d hit the clock
at 6:AM
Jake pulled the handle
of three 30 year old
Cumming’s drill presses
and I’d set up the Gleasons
making gears
for the machines that kept
Brandon
26 year old fresh kid
son of the owner in his white shirts
to impress his blond
23 year old wife.
Soon as we got our
ten minute break
we’d
head for the shitter
and kill
a pint
of Kessler’s
and that would
get us to lunch.
Me and Jake
are now
in our 50s
seen action
in Vietnam
are
being introduced
by age
to hell
loss
by
loss.

Goude’s poems are cut-throat, matter of fact images about those who live trapped in the everyday horror of the human condition. Goude is an outlaw poet, and by that I mean he’s been places a lot of readers may rather not go. He also uses an economy of words, in the style of Moore. You may imagine through his poems that he has probably woken up next to the train tracks more than once in his life. Like Moore, he has lived hard and close to the bone.

Gary Goude is a machine shop worker in Los Angeles. He’s also a Vietnam vet. And he happens to write the most gut-wrenchingly real poetry you’ll have read since the death of the originator of blood and guts poetry Charles Bukowski, who interestingly enough, found an audience among the uppity poetry folks when he was first published in the NYQ back in the early ’70s. Well, folks, Gary Goude is the new Bukowski. His stuff is about the real everyday hell we all go through. He is an every man. Married. Divorced. On the outs with one son and now the other. He can’t maintain a a relationship with a woman. He has few friends. His trust in his fellow man all gone. And he self medicates with alcohol. He’s nearing 60 and his words should be read by everyone who can’t stand regular, dull, lifeless, having nothing to do with anything poetry, you know, the flowery bullcrap that makes no sense and means. –Robert W. Howington

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