gary goude | sad lives

SAD LIVES

She told me
her life was useless.
“Of course”
I said
“All of them are.”
She said
she was sad
had been all along.
“That is
a sign of
tremendous
intelligence”
I replied
taking a good hit
off the bottle
of Early Times
we were sharing.
“No, I mean
I am depressed.”
I grabbed
her right breast
poured whiskey
upon it, then kissed
her mouth,
felt my
cock
engorge with blood
and looked into her soul.
“Baby
you don’t
understand'”
I said.
“Love will
not save us.
Fucking is only
an afterthought.
Death
is our
only salvation.”
Then
I finished.

grave2.jpgGoude’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

0 Replies to “gary goude | sad lives”

  1. If Gary Goude wrote novels, they’d be a combination of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson.
    What Goude knows more than anyone else is that we are all in hell, now.

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