Poems by Charles Bukowskiat the track today,
Father's Day,
each paid admission was
entitled to a wallet
and each contained a
little surprise.
from my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire.
one flies
off.
then
another.
one is left,
then
it too
is gone.
shot in the eye
shot in the brain
shot in the ass
shot like a flower in the dance
the phone rang at 1:30 a.m.
and it was a man from Denver:
Charles Bukowsk
it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street
I used to get drunk
and throw the radio through the window
we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
Long walks at night--
that's what good for the soul:
peeking into windows
watching tired housewives
trying to fight off
having the low down blues and going
into a restraunt to eat.
you sit at a table.
the waitress smiles at you.
washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook
out again
I write from the bed
as I did last
year.
will see the doctor,
Monday.
I awaken about noon and go out to get the mail
in my old torn bathrobe.
I'm hung over
hair down in my eyes
barefoot
we are always asked
to understand the other person's
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.
one is asked
drunk on the dark streets of some city,
it's night, you're lost, where's your
room?
you enter a bar to find yourself,
with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
she died of alcoholism
wrapped in a blanket
on a deck chair
on an ocean
steamer.
all her books of
terrified loneliness
the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
at one stage in my life
I met a man who claimed to have
visited Pound at St. Elizabeths.
then I met a woman who not only
waiting for death
like a cat
that will jump on the
bed
I am so very sorry for
my wife
she will see this
stiff
white
body
I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
good weather
is like
good women-
it doesn't always happen
and when it does
it doesn't
always last.
man is
more stable:
the final curtain on one of the longest running
musicals ever, some people claim to have
seen it over one hundred times.
It's never quite right, he said, the way people look,
the way the music sounds, the way the words are
written.
death wants more death, and its webs are full:
I remember my father's garage, how child-like
I would brush the corpses of flies
naked along the side of the house,
8 a.m., spreading sesame seed oil
over my body, Jesus, have I come
to this?
I've come by, she says, to tell you
that this is it. I'm not kidding, it's
over. this is it.
some dogs who sleep At night
must dream of bones
and I remember your bones
in flesh
and best
in that dark green dress
We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the critics now have me
drinking champagne and
driving a BMW
and also married to a
socialite from
Philadelphia's Main Line
you haven't lived
until you've been in a
flophouse
with nothing but one
light bulb
and 56 men
squeezed together
on cots
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
he drank wine all night of the
28th, and he kept thinking of her:
the way she walked and talked and loved
I can remember starving in a
small room in a strange city
shades pulled down, listening to
classical music
sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
I'm not going to make it , but you laugh inside
Sunday, I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthadox to the
west.
she is dark
of Eastern descent,
I read a book about John Dos Passos and according to
the book once radical-communist
this fear of being what they are:
dead.
at least they are not out on the street, they
are careful to stay indoors, those
drunk again at 3 a.m. at the end of my 2nd bottle
of wine, I have typed from a dozen to 15 pages of
poesy
an old man
There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
hooray say the roses, today is blamesday
and we are red as blood.
hooray say the roses, today is Wednesday
she was hot, she was so hot
I didn't want anybody else to have her,
and if I didn't get home on time
during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
In the betting line the other
day
man behind me asked,
"are you Henry
Chinaski?"
"uh huh," I answered.
I reached up into the top of the closet
and took out a pair of blue panties
and showed them to her and
asked "are these yours?"
I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
she's young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
almost dawn
blackbirds on the telephone wire
waiting
as I eat yesterday's
forgotten sandwich
at 6 a.m.
there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
cimen altinda gecen 225 gunden sonra benden daha cok sey biliyor olmalisin.
Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you
when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb, unsophisticated.
it sits outside my window now
like and old woman going to market;
it sits and watches me,
it sweats nevously
once
we were young
at this
machine. . .
I am in this low-slung sports car
painted a deep, rich yellow
driving under an Italian sun.
I have a British accent.
here I am
in the ground
my mouth
open
and
I can't even say
mama,
and
the dogs run by and stop and piss
majestic, majic
infinite
my little girl is
sun
on the carpet-
out the door
picking a flower, ha!
an old man,
battle-wrecked,
the history of melancholia
includes all of us.
a girlfriend came in
built me a bed
scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor
scrubbed the walls
vacuumed
cleaned the toilet
"what?" they say, "you got a
computer ?"
it's like I have sold out to
the enemy.
I had no idea so many
people were prejudiced
was a truly amazing man
he pretended to be
rich
even though we lived on beans and mush and weenies
when I look back now
at the abuse I took from
her
I feel shame that I was so
innocent,
but I must say
he's a dandy
small moustache
usually sucking on a cigar
he tends to lean into cars as he
transacts business
I read last Saturday in the
redwoods outside of Santa Cruz
and I was about 3/4's finished
when I heard a long high scream
I was fairly drunk when it
began and I took out my bottle and used it
along the way. I was reading a week or two after
not much chance,
I'll settle for the 6 horse
I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
they talk down through
the centuries to us,
and this we need more and more,
the statues and paintings
in midnight age
I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
out of the arm of one love
and into the arms of another
never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
bicycling through that
city
wearing a
beret
and
Camus
always
pissed
me
off.
To end up alone
in a tomb of a room
without cigarettes
or wine--
just a lightbulb
and a potbelly,
grayhaired,
and glad to have
it
takes
a lot of
by God, I don't know what to
each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
a symphony orchestra.
the vultures at the zoo
(all three of them)
sit very quietly in their
caged tree
and below
on the ground
little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won't flinch and
I won't blame
you,
I have just spent one-hour-and-a-half
handicapping tomorrow's
card.
when am I going to get at the poems?
the goldfish sing all night with guitars,
and the whores go down with the stars,
the whores go down with the stars
when you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
I took my girlfriend to your last poetry reading,
she said.
yes, yes? I asked.
she's young and pretty, she said.
and? I asked.
I can't have it
and you can't have it
and we won't
get it
so don't bet on it
or even think about
it
just get out of bed
she was a short one
getting fat and she had once been
beautiful and
she drank the wine
she drank the wine in bed and
he said, "I was working in Hollywood when Faulkner was
working in Hollywood and he was
the words have come and gone,
I sit ill.
the phone rings, the cats sleep.
Linda vacuums.
I am waiting to live,
waiting to die.
some people never go crazy.
me, sometimes I'll lie down behind the couch
for 3 or 4 days.
they'll find me there.
god I got the sad blue blues,
we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
the illusion is that you are simply
reading this poem.
the reality is that this is
more than a
poem.
this is a beggar's knife.
you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.
shot down like an ex-pug selling
too much too little
too fat
too thin
or nobody.
laughter or
tears
haters
lovers
strangers with faces like
the backs of
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day
the German hotel was very strange and expensive and had
double doors to the rooms, very thick doors, and it over-
I was always a natural slob
I liked to lay upon the bed
in undershirt (stained, of
course) (and with cigarette
holes)
shoes off
he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
They are building a house
half a block down
and I sit up here
with the shades down
listening to the sounds,
the lady has me temporarily off the bottle
and now the pecker stands up
better.
however, things change overnight--
stuck in the rain on the freeway, 6:15 p.m.,
these are the lucky ones, these are the
call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
what i liked about e.e. cummings
was that he cut away from
the holiness of the
word
and with charm
and gamble
gave us lines
at their best, there is gentleness in Humanity.
some understanding and, at times, acts of
courage
They don't make it
the beautiful die in flame-
suicide pills, rat poison, rope what-
ever...
they rip their arms off,
I was shacked with a
Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.
often it is the only
thing
between you and
impossibility.
no drink,
no woman's love,
no wealth
can
match it.
when God created love he didn't help most
when God created dogs He didn't help dogs
when God created plants that was average
starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for
hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
