"An Almost Made Up Poem"

I see you drinking at the fountain with tiny

blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny

they are small, and the fountain is in France

where you wrote me that last letter and

I answered and never heard from you again.

you used to write insane poems about

ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you

knew famous artists and most of them

were your lovers, and I wrote back, it' all right,

go ahead, enter their lives, I' not jealous

because we' never met.  we got close once in

New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never

touched.  so you went with the famous and wrote

about the famous, and, of course, what you found out

is that the famous are worried about

their fame - not the beautiful young girl in bed

with them, who gives them that, and then awakens

in the morning to write upper case poems about

ANGELS AND GOD.  we know God is dead, they' told

us, but listening to you I wasn' sure.  maybe

it was the upper case.  you were one of the

editors, "her, print her, she' mad but she'

magic.  there' no lie in her fire."  I loved you

like a man loves a woman he never touches, only

writes to, keeps little photographs of.  I would have

loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a

cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,

but that didn' happen.  your letters got sadder.

your lovers betrayed you.  kid, I wrote back, all

lovers betray.  it didn' help.  you said

you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and

the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying

bench every night and wept for the lovers who had

hurt and forgotten you.  I wrote back but never

heard again.  a friend wrote me of your suicide

3 or 4 months after it happened.  if I had met you

I would probably have been unfair to you or you

to me.  it was best like this.

Charles Bukowski 1920-1994

I'd love to know who this woman was; or was she just a figment?