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    The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

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      CHARLES BUKOWSKI

      THE ROOMINGHOUSE MADRIGALS

      EARLY SELECTED POEMS 1946-1966

      Table of Contents

      Foreword

      22,000 Dollars in 3 Months

      On Seeing an Old Civil War Painting…

      What to Do with Contributor’s Copies?

      Brave Bull

      It’s Not Who Lived Here

      O, We Are the Outcasts

      Poem for My 43rd Birthday

      The Genius of the Crowd

      4:30 A.M.

      The Simplicity of Everything in Viet Nam

      The Night They Took Whitey

      The Japanese Wife

      Sundays Kill More Men Than Bombs

      The Loser

      On a Night You Don’t Sleep

      An Empire of Coins

      All I Know

      On Going Back to the Street…

      Anthony

      Layover

      The Dogs of Egypt

      Old Man, Dead in a Room

      Love Is a Piece of Paper Torn to Bits

      Big Bastard with a Sword

      About My Very Tortured Friend, Peter

      Not Quite So Soon

      Counsel

      I Wait in the White Rain

      Breakout

      I Cannot Stand Tears

      Horse on Fire

      Mother and Son

      The Day I Kicked Away a Bankroll

      The Dogs

      Imbecile Night

      A Kind of Lecture…

      The Gift

      Object Lesson

      Goldfish

      Sleep

      Hello, Willie Shoemaker

      The Literary Life

      Countryside

      Death Wants More Death

      Eat

      10 Lions and the End of the World

      The Blackbirds Are Rough Today

      A Word on the Quick and Modern Poem-Makers

      Seahorse

      I Have Lived in England

      Farewell, Foolish Objects

      A Report Upon the Consumption of Myself

      Fleg

      Interviewed by a Guggenheim Recipient

      Very

      The Look:

      One Night Stand

      Poem to a Most Affectionate Lady

      Parts of an Opera, Parts of a Guitar…

      Letter from the North

      The Best Way to Get Famous Is to Run Away

      The Kings Are Gone

      Reprieve and Admixture

      The Swans Walk My Brain…

      The End

      A Farewell Thing While Breathing

      Sad-Eyed Mules of Men

      Dear Friend

      A Conversation on Morality…

      Soirée

      Notations from a Muddled Indolence

      Nothing Subtle

      I Don’t Need a Bedsheet with Slits for Eyes…

      86’d

      The Ants

      Suicide

      3:30 A.M. Conversation

      Cows in Art Class

      Practice

      I Kneel

      Freedom: The Unmolested Eagle of Myself

      Singing is Fire

      The Sun Wields Mercy

      On the Failure of a Poet

      The Beast

      A Rat Rises

      Pansies

      The Man with the Hot Nose

      Hangover and Sick Leave

      Mercy, Wherever You Are…

      It’s Nothing to Laugh About

      35 Seconds

      Regard Me

      With Vengeance Like a Tiger Crawls

      Itch, Come and Gone

      This

      2 Outside, As Bones Break in My Kitchen

      Saying Goodbye to Love

      You Smoke a Cigarette

      Friendly Advice to a Lot of Young Men

      Everything

      …American Express, Athens, Greece

      One Hundred and Ninety-Nine Pounds…

      I Write This Upon the Last Drink’s Hammer

      Poem for Liz

      A Nice Place

      Insomnia

      Wrong Number

      When the Berry Bush Dies…

      Face While Shaving

      9 Rings

      Somebody Always Breaking My Dainty Solitude…

      Thank God for Alleys

      The Millionaire

      Dow Jones: Down

      As I Lay Dying

      A Minor Impulse to Complain

      Buffalo Bill

      Experience

      I Am Visited by an Editor and a Poet

      The Mexican Girls

      The New Place

      Conversation in a Cheap Room

      I Was Born to Hustle Roses Down the Avenues of the Dead

      Winter Comes to a Lot of Places in August

      Bring Down the Beams

      Reunion

      Fragile!

      I Am with the Roots of Flowers

      Monday Beach, Cold Day

      The High-Rise of the New World

      The Gypsies Near Del Mar

      6 A.M.

      A Trick to Dull Our Bleeding

      Rose, Rose

      Spain Sits Like a Hidden Flower in My Coffeepot

      Thermometer

      Eaten by Butterflies

      Destroying Beauty

      About the Author

      Other Books by Charles Bukowski

      Cover

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      Foreword

      A question put to me quite often is, “Why do your out-of-print books cost so much?” Well, they cost so much because that’s what booksellers can get for them from collectors.

      “I want to read your early poems but…”

      I don’t even have some of my early books. Most of them were stolen by people I drank with. When I’d go to the bathroom, they did their shit. It only reinforced my general opinion of humanity. And caused me to drink with fewer people.

      At first, I made efforts to replace these books, and did, but when they were stolen all over again I stopped the replacement process and more and more drank alone.

      Anyhow, what follows are what we consider to be the best of the early poems. Some are taken from the first few books; others were not in books but have been taken from obscure magazines of long ago.

      The early poems are more lyrical than where I am at now. I like these poems but I disagree with some who claim, “Bukowski’s early work was much better.” Some have made these claims in critical reviews, others in parlors of gossip.

      Now the reader can make his own judgment, first hand.

      In my present poetry, I go at matters more directly, land on them and then get out. I don’t believe that my early methods and my late methods are either inferior or superior to one another. They are different, that’s all.

      Yet, re-reading these, there remains a certain fondness for that time. Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had preceded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn’t and the food wasn’t and the rent wasn’t. Sometimes the typer was in hock. Sometimes there was only the park bench. But at the best of times there was the small room and the machine and the bottle. The sound of the keys, on and on, and shouts: “HEY! KNOCK IT OFF, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! WE’RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE’VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!” With broomsticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines….

      I was not Ha
    msun eating his own flesh in order to continue writing but I had a fair amount of travail. The poems were sent out as written on first impulse, no line or word changes. I never revised or retyped. To eliminate an error, I would simply go over it thus: #########, and go on with the line. One magazine editor printed a group of my poems with all the ########s intact.

      At any rate, here are many of the poems from that wondrous and crazy time, from those distant hours. The room steamed with smoke, dizzied with fumes, we gambled. I hope they work for you. And if they don’t, well, #### ## ###.

      Charles Bukowski

      San Pedro, 10-31-87

      22,000 Dollars in 3 Months

      night has come like something crawling

      up the bannister, sticking out its tongue

      of fire, and I remember the

      missionaries up to their knees in muck

      retreating across the beautiful blue river

      and the machine gun slugs flicking spots of

      fountain and Jones drunk on the shore

      saying shit shit these Indians

      where’d they get the fire power?

      and I went in to see Maria

      and she said, do you think they’ll attack,

      do you think they’ll come across the river?

      afraid to die? I asked her, and she said

      who isn’t?

      and I went to the medicine cabinet

      and poured a tall glassful, and I said

      we’ve made 22,000 dollars in 3 months building roads

      for Jones and you have to die a little

      to make it that fast…Do you think the communists

      started this? she asked, do you think it’s the communists?

      and I said, will you stop being a neurotic bitch.

      these small countries rise because they are getting

      their pockets filled from both sides…and she

      looked at me with that beautiful schoolgirl idiocy

      and she walked out, it was getting dark but I let her go,

      you’ve got to know when to let a woman go if you want to

      keep her,

      and if you don’t want to keep her you let her go anyhow,

      so it’s always a process of letting go, one way or the other,

      so I sat there and put the drink down and made another

      and I thought, whoever thought an engineering course at Old Miss

      would bring you where the lamps swing slowly

      in the green of some far night?

      and Jones came in with his arm around her blue waist

      and she had been drinking too, and I walked up and said,

      man and wife? and that made her angry for if a woman can’t

      get you by the nuts and squeeze, she’s done,

      and I poured another tall one, and

      I said, you 2 may not realize it

      but we’re not going to get out of here alive.

      we drank the rest of the night.

      you could hear, if you were real still,

      the water coming down between the god trees,

      and the roads we had built

      you could hear animals crossing them

      and the Indians, savage fools with some savage cross to bear.

      and finally there was the last look in the mirror

      as the drunken lovers hugged

      and I walked out and lifted a piece of straw

      from the roof of the hut

      then snapped the lighter, and I

      watched the flames crawl, like hungry mice

      up the thin brown stalks, it was slow but it was

      real, and then not real, something like an opera,

      and then I walked down toward the machine gun sounds,

      the same river, and the moon looked across at me

      and in the path I saw a small snake, just a small one,

      looked like a rattler, but it couldn’t be a rattler,

      and it was scared seeing me, and I grabbed it behind the neck

      before it could coil and I held it then

      its little body curled around my wrist

      like a finger of love and all the trees looked with eyes

      and I put my mouth to its mouth

      and love was lightning and remembrance,

      dead communists, dead fascists, dead democrats, dead gods and

      back in what was left of the hut Jones

      had his dead black arm around her dead blue waist.

      On Seeing an Old Civil War Painting with My Love

      I

      the cannoneer is dead,

      and all the troops;

      the conceited drummer boy

      dumber than the tombs

      lies in a net of red;

      and under leaves, bugs twitch antennae

      deciding which way to move

      under the cool umbrella of decay;

      the wind rills down like thin water

      and searches under clothing,

      sifting and sorry;

      …clothing anchored with heavy bones

      in noonday sleep

      like men gone down on ladders, resting;

      yet an hour ago

      tree-shadow and man-shadow

      showed their outline against the sun—

      yet now, not a man amongst them

      can single out the reason

      that moved them down toward nothing;

      and I think mostly of some woman far off

      arranging important jars on some second shelf

      and humming a dry, sun-lit tune.

      II

      outside, the quick storm turns the night slowly

      backwards

      and sends it shifting to old shores,

      and everywhere are bones…rib bones and light,

      and grass, grass leaning left;

      and we hump our backs against the wet like living things,

      and this one with me now

      holds my yearning like a packet

      slips it into her purse with her powders and potions

      pulls up a sheer stocking, chatters, touches her hair:

     
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