Poetry has never been my forte. Speaking in metaphor I can do. Allegory, iamb, meter, assonance, dactyls, sestinas - I understand how they work and how to use them, and yet, any time I've ever tried my hand at the art, it ends up sounding like something Christopher Guest might pass off as satire in a flick about writers or something. Only I'm not being satirical.

It's not a problem Bukowski ever seemed to face. It's hard to know why, although I think it mostly has to do with the genuine nature of his perspective. All the best writers and artists are crazy drunks with resumes speckled with blood. And if they aren't, there's something else dark around them, like Christopher "Biggie Smalls" Wallace, who grew up in a fairly well-adjusted home and still managed to find his way into drug dealing and jail before embarking on a brilliant rap career that ended in a hail of bullets on March 9, 1997.

You know who else died on March 9? Charles Bukowski. In 1994.

Both revered American poets, they were bouncing around in my head as we made our way to the Putt N' Pub in Lakewood last Friday. I was looking for something a little grittier than the faux glitz of LoDo or the varnished and spackled digs on East Colfax. So I made my way west on Colfax, past the art-deco car-lot signs and Casa Bonita's tower, almost all the way to Kipling, where we pulled around the mossy green faade of this West Colfax roadhouse and into a packed parking lot that boasted at least as many pickup trucks and late-'70s American muscle cars as mid-'90s Hondas and Toyotas.

The Putt N' Pub is a sprawling gin mill, enveloped in wood paneling with small globe lights popping out every few feet from the ceiling above. We found a table in the back of the room, right by a few claw machines and toy dispensers and the Golden Tee game. A man who had to be in his 70s stood in front of the machine, dressed in a black suit. A few feet over, a young couple sat at the bar, legs intertwined, hands in each other's laps. Her piercings, dog collar and punkish hair didn't seem to fit with the blue-collar construction-worker fashion sense of her compatriot.

Indeed, incongruities abounded throughout the room. There was the biker with full sleeve tattoos, playing pool with a diminutive woman dressed as masculine as possible. In front of the blaring cover band at the other end of the room, a 6-foot-tall brunette wearing a black spandex strapless dress freaked a much shorter man wearing a football jersey, torn jeans and sneakers. The couple sitting directly next to us sported an age discrepancy of what had to be at least three decades and alternately kissed each other and screamed at each other over the course of the next hour - an hour in which we downed six drinks between the four of us and spent only $20. Not too bad.

I can certainly say there was nothing staged about this scene. It was all a bit too chaotic in its slightly decaying urban beauty. The Putt N' Pub is the kind of roadhouse you might not bring Mom to, but Aunt Sofie could handle it, you know, because she drinks bourbon neat, and her favorite book is Ham on Rye.

Putt N' Pub

7785 W. Colfax Ave 303-237-7511

• You're less than 20 blocks away from the best-named and most authentic diner in town: Davies Chuck Wagon Diner (9495 W. Colfax Ave. 303-297-5252). Go there some time.

• Happy hour 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, $1 off all drinks

• Check out Taco Tuesday: 50-cent tacos and tostadas until 7 p.m.