the last weeping of life forever but
I am bigger than the mountains.
it’s the way you play the game
call it love
stand it up in the failing
light
put it in a dress
pray sing beg cry laugh
turn off the lights
turn on the radio
add trimmings:
butter, raw eggs, yesterday’s
newspaper;
one new shoelace, then add
paprika, sugar, salt, pepper,
phone your drunken aunt in
Calexico;
call it love, you
skewer it good, add
cabbage and applesauce,
then heat it from the
left side,
then heat it from the right
side,
put it in a box
give it away
leave it on a doorstep
vomiting as you go
into the
hydrangea.
on the continent
I’m soft. I
dream too.
I let myself dream. I dream of
being famous. I dream of
walking the streets of London and
Paris. I dream of
sitting in cafes
drinking fine wines and
taking a taxi back to a good
hotel.
I dream of
meeting beautiful ladies in the hall
and
turning them away because
I have a sonnet in mind that
I want to write
before sunrise. at sunrise
I will be asleep and there will be a
strange cat curled up on the
windowsill.
I think we all feel like this
now and then.
I’d even like to visit
Andernach, Germany, the place where
I began. then I’d like to
fly on to Moscow to check out
their mass transit system so
I’d have something faintly lewd to
whisper into the ear of the mayor of
Los Angeles upon my return to this
fucking place.
it could happen.
I’m ready.
I’ve watched snails climb over
ten foot walls and
vanish.
you mustn’t confuse this with
ambition.
I would be able to laugh at my
good turn of the cards—
and I won’t forget you.
I’ll send postcards and
snapshots, and the
finished sonnet.
12:18 a.m.
beheaded in the middle of the
night
scratching my sides
I am covered with bites
kick my white legs out of the sheets
as the sirens scream
there is a gun blast.
I go to the kitchen
for a glass of water
destroy the reverie of a roach
destroy the roach.
a gale comes from the North
as the man in the apartment across
from me
inserts his penis into the rump of his
4 year old
daughter.
I hear the screams
light a cigar
stick it into the lips of my
beheaded head.
it is half a cigar
stale
a Medalist Naturáles, No. 7.
I walk back to the bedroom
with a spray can.
I press the button.
it hisses. I
gag,
think of ancient wars
loves dead.
so much happens in the dark
yet tomorrow
the sun will move up and on,
you’ll get a ticket if you park on the
south side of the street on
Thursday
or the north side on
Friday.
the efficiency of the sun and the
law
bulwarks sanity.
something bites me.
I madden
spray half my
bedsheets.
I turn
see the dark mirror—
the cigar
the loose belly
me
old.
I laugh.
it’s good they don’t
know.
I take my head
put it back on my
neck
get between the sheets and
can’t sleep.
yellow cab
the Mexican dancer shook her fans at
me and her ass at me, I
didn’t ask her to and
my woman got mad and ran out of the cafe and
it began raining and you could hear it on the
roof and I didn’t have a job and I had 13 days left
on the rent.
sometimes when a woman runs out on you like
that you wonder if it’s not
economics, you can’t blame them—
if I had to get fucked I’d rather get fucked
by somebody with money.
we’re all scared but when you’re ugly and you
don’t have much left you get
strong, and I called the waiter over and I said,
I think I am going to turn this table over, I’m
bored, I’m insane, I need
action, call in your goon, I’ll piss on his
collarbone.
I got
thrown out swiftly. it was
raining. I picked myself up in the rain and
walked down the empty street
cotton candy sweet
dumb shit for sale, all the little stores locked
with 67¢ Woolworth locks.
I reached the end of the street in time
to see her get into the yellow cab with
another guy.
I fell down by a garbage can, stood up
and pissed against it, feeling sad and not
sad, knowing there was only so much they could do to
you, piss sliding down the corrugated
tin, the philosophers must have had something to
say about this. women. their luck against your
destiny. winner take Barcelona. next
bar.
how come you’re not unlisted?
the men phone and ask me that.
are you really Charles Bukowski
the writer? they ask.
I’m a sometimes writer, I say,
most often I don’t do anything.
listen, they ask, I like your
stuff—do you mind if I come
over and bring a couple of 6
packs?
you can bring them, I say
if you don’t come in…
when the women phone, I say,
o yes, I write, I’m a writer
only I’m not writing right now.
I feel foolish phoning you,
they say, and I was surprised
to find you listed in the phone book.
I have reasons, I say,
by the way why don’t you come over
for a beer?
you wouldn’t mind?
and they arrive
handsome women
good of mind and body and eye.
often there isn’t sex
but I’m used to that
yet it’s good
very good just to look at them—
and some rare times
I have unexpected good luck
otherwise.
for a man of 55 who didn’t get laid
until he was 23
and not very often until he was 50
I think that I shoul
d stay listed
via Pacific Telephone
until I get as much as
the average man has had.
of course, I’ll have to keep
writing immortal poems
but the inspiration is there.
weather report
I suppose it’s raining in some Spanish town
now
while I’m feeling bad
like this;
I’d like to think so
now.
let’s go to a Mexican hamlet—
that sounds nice:
a Mexican hamlet
while I’m feeling bad
like this
the walls yellow with age—
that rain
out there,
a pig moving in his pen at night
disturbed by the rain,
little eyes like cigarette-ends,
and his damned tail:
see it?
I can’t imagine the people.
it’s hard for me to imagine the people.
maybe they are feeling bad like this,
almost as bad as this.
I wonder what they do when they feel
bad?
they probably don’t mention it.
they say,
“look, it’s raining.”
that’s the best way.
clean old man
here I’ll be
55 in a
week.
what will I
write about
when it no
longer stands
up in the morning?
my critics
will love it
when my playground
narrows down to
tortoises
and shellstars.
they might even
say
nice things about
me
as if I had
finally
come to my
senses.
something
I’m out of matches.
the springs in my couch
are broken.
they stole my footlocker.
they stole my oil painting of
two pink eyes.
my car broke down.
eels climb my bathroom walls.
my love is broken.
but the stockmarket went up
today.
a plate glass window
dogs and angels are not
very different.
I often go to this place
to eat
about 2:30 in the afternoon
because all the people who eat
there are particularly addled
simply glad to be alive and
eating baked beans
near a plate glass window
which holds the heat
and doesn’t let the cars and
sidewalks inside.
we are allowed as much free
coffee as we can drink
and we sit and quietly drink
the black strong coffee.
it is good to be sitting someplace
in a world at 2:30 in the afternoon
without having the flesh ripped from
your bones. even
being addled, we know this.
nobody bothers us
we bother nobody.
angels and dogs are not
very different
at 2:30 in the afternoon.
I have my favorite table
and after I have finished
I stack the plates, saucers,
the cup, the silverware
neatly—
my offering to the luck—
and that sun
working good
all up and
down
inside the
darkness
here.
junkies
“she shoots up in the neck,” she told
me. I told her to stick it into my
ass and she tried and said, “oh oh,”
and I said, “what the hell’s the matter?”
she said, “nothing, this is New York
style,” and she jammed it in again and said,
“oh shit.” I took it and put it into
my arm, I got part of it.
“I don’t know why people
fuck with the stuff, there’s not that
much to it. I think they’re all losers
and they want to lose real bad. there’s
no other way, it’s like they can’t
get where they’re going or want to go
and there’s no other way.
this has got to be it.
she shoots up in the neck.”
“I know,” I said. “I phoned her, she
could hardly talk, said it was
laryngitis. have some of this wine.”
it was white wine and 4:30 a.m. and her
daughter was sleeping in the bedroom. she
had cable tv with no sound and
a large screen young John Wayne watched
us, and we neither kissed nor made
love and I left at 6:15 a.m.
after the beer and wine were gone
so her daughter wouldn’t awaken for
school and find me sitting in
bed with her mother
with John Wayne and the night gone
and not much chance for anybody—
99 to one
the blazing shark
wants my balls
as I walk through the meat section
looking for salami and cheese
purple housewives
fingering 75 cent avocados
know my shopping cart is an
oversized cock
I am a man with a switchball watch
standing in a honky-tonk phonebooth
sucking strawberry red titty
upsidedown in a Philadelphia crowd.
suddenly all about me are screams of
RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE
and I am stiffing it to something beneath me
dyed red hair, bad breath, blue teeth
I used to like Monet
I used to like Monet very much
it was funny, I thought, the way he did it
with colors
women are so expensive
dog leashes are expensive
I am going to start selling air in dark orange bags
marked: moon-blooms
I used to like bottles full of blood
young girls in camel-hair coats
Prince Valiant
Popeye’s magic touch
the struggle is in the struggle
like a corkscrew
a good man doesn’t get cork in the wine
the thought has occurred to millions of men
while shaving
the removal of life might be preferred to
the removal of hair
spit out cotton and clean your rearview
mirror, run like you mean it, drunk jock,
the whores will win, the fools will win,
but break like a horse out of the gate.
the crunch
too much
too little
too fat
too thin
or nobody.
laughter or
tears
haters
lovers
strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks
armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.
or an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.
it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.