he does not reveal it.
perhaps there isn’t any
reason?
strange and disturbing arrangements are
made; his books and paintings are quietly
auctioned off;
no new work has appeared now for
years.
yet his public won’t accept his
silence—
if he is dead
they want to know; if he is
insane they want to know; if he has a
reason, please tell us!
they walk past his house
write letters
ring the bell
they cannot understand and will not
accept
the way things are.
I rather like
it.
the smoking car
they stop out front here
it looks as if the car is on fire
the smoke blazes blue from the hood and exhaust
the motor sounds like cannon shots
the car humps wildly
one guy gets out,
Jesus, he says, he takes a long drink from a
canvas water bag
and gives the car an eerie look.
the other guy gets out and looks at the car,
Jesus, he says,
and he takes a drink from a pint of whiskey,
then passes the bottle to his
friend.
they both stand and look at the car,
one holding the whiskey, the other the water bag.
they are not dressed in conventional hippie garb
but in natural old clothes
faded, dirty and torn.
a butterfly goes past my window
and they get back in the
car
and it bucks off in low
like a rodeo bronc
they are both laughing
and one has the bottle
tilted…
the butterfly is gone
and outside there is a globe of smoke
40 feet in circumference.
first human beings I’ve seen in Los Angeles
in 15 years.
the shoelace
a woman, a
tire that’s flat, a
disease, a
desire; fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard…
it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
mad house. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
mad house…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left…
the dread of life
is that swarm of trivialities
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which are always there—
license plates or taxes
or expired driver’s license,
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
constipation
speeding tickets
rickets or crickets or mice or termites or
roaches or flies or a
broken hook on a
screen, or out of gas
or too much gas,
the sink’s stopped up, the landlord’s drunk,
the president doesn’t care and the governor’s
crazy.
lightswitch broken, mattress like a
porcupine;
$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at
Sears Roebuck;
and the phone bill’s up and the market’s
down
and the toilet chain is
broken,
and the light has burned out—
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it’s
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.
then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails
and people who insist they’re
your friends;
there’s always that and worse;
leaky faucet, Christ and Christmas;
blue salami, 9 day rains,
50 cent avocados
and purple
liverwurst.
or making it
as a waitress at Norm’s on the split shift,
or as an emptier of
bedpans,
or as a carwash or a busboy
or a stealer of old lady’s purses
leaving them screaming on the sidewalks
with broken arms at the age of
80.
suddenly
2 red lights in your rearview mirror
and blood in your
underwear;
toothache, and $979 for a bridge
$300 for a gold
tooth,
and China and Russia and America, and
long hair and short hair and no
hair, and beards and no
faces, and plenty of zigzag but no
pot, except maybe one to piss in and
the other one around your
gut.
with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
mad house.
so be careful
when you
bend over.
self-inflicted wounds
he talked about Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe and he
wrote like a cross between the two of them
and I lived in a hotel on Figueroa Street
close to the bars
and he lived further uptown in a small room
and we both wanted to be writers
and we’d meet at the public library, sit on the stone
benches and talk about that.
he showed me his short stories and he wrote well, he
wrote better than I did, there was a calm and a
strength in his work that mine did not have.
my stories were jagged, harsh, with self-inflicted wounds.
I showed him all my work but he was more impressed with
my drinking prowess and my worldly attitude
after talking a bit we would go to Clifton’s Cafeteria
for our only meal of the day
(for less than a dollar in 1941)
yet
we were in great health.
we lost jobs, found jobs, lost jobs.
mostly we didn’t work, we always envisioned we soon
would be receiving regular checks from
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and
Harper’s.
we ran with a gang of young men who didn’t envision
anything at all
but they had a gallant lawless charm
and we drank with them and fought with them and
had a hell of a wild good time.
then just like that he joined the Marine Corps.
“I want to prove something to myself” was what he told
me.
he did: right after boot camp the war came and in 3 months
he was dead.
and I promised myself that some day I would write a novel and that
I would dedicate it to him.
I have now written 5 novels, all dedicated to others.
you know, you were right, Robert Baun, when you once told
me, “Bukowski, about half of what you say is
bullshit.”
Verdi
and
so
we suck on a cigar
and a beer
attempting to mend the love
wounds of the soul.
/>
a beer.
a cigar.
I listen to Verdi
scratch my hindquarters
and
stare out of
a cloud of
blue
smoke.
have you ever been to
Venice?
Madrid?
the stress of continually facing the
lowered
horn
is wearing.
then too
I sometimes think of a
less stressful kind of
love—
it can and should be so
easy
like falling asleep
in a chair or
like a church full of
windows.
sad enough,
I wish only for that careless love
which is sweet
gentle
and which is
now
(like
this light
over my head)
there only to serve me
while I
smoke smoke smoke
out of a certain center dressed
in an old brown shirt.
but I am caught under a pile of
bricks;
poetry is shot in the head
and walks down the alley
pissing on its legs.
friends, stop writing of
breathing
in this sky of fire.
small children,
walk well behind us.
but now Verdi
abides with the
wallpaper
with beerlove,
with the taste of wet gold as
my fingers dabble in ashes
as strange young ladies walk outside
my window
dreaming of broomsticks,
palaces
and
blueberry pie.
(uncollected)
the young lady who lives in Canoga Park
she only fucks the ones she doesn’t want
to marry.
to the others she says
you’ve got to marry me.
or maybe she just fucks the ones she wants
to fuck?
she talks about it freely
and lives in the apartment at the end
with a 9-year-old red-haired boy
and a 7-month-old baby.
she gets child support
and when she works
she works in the factories or as a
cocktail waitress.
she has a boyfriend 60 years old
who drinks a jug of wine a day
has a bad leg
and lives at the YMCA.
she smokes dope, mostly grass,
takes pills
wears large dark glasses
and talks talks talks
while not looking at you and
twisting a long beaded necklace with her thin
nervous fingers.
she has a neck like a swan,
could be a movie star,
twice in the mad house,
a mother in the mad house,
and a sister in prison.
you never know when she is going to
go mad again and
throw tiny fits
and 3 a.m. phone calls at you.
the kids trundle about the apartment
and she fucks and doesn’t fuck,
has an exercise chart on her wall
bends this way and that
touches her toes
leaps
stretches and so
forth. she goes from dope to religion
and from religion back to dope and
from black guys to white guys and from white to
black again.
when she takes off those dark glasses
her eyes are blue
and she tries to smile
as she twists that necklace
around and around.
there are 3 keys on the end of it:
her car key
her apartment key
and one that I’ve never
asked her about.
she’s not given up,
she’s not dead yet,
she’s hardly even old,
her air conditioner doesn’t
work and that’s really all I know
about her because I’m one of those
she wants to
marry.
(uncollected)
life of the king
I awaken at 11:30 a.m.
get into my chinos and a clean green shirt
open a Miller’s,
and nothing in the mailbox but the
Berkeley Tribe
which I don’t subscribe to,
and on KUSC there is organ music
something by Bach
and I leave the door open
stand on the porch
walk out front
hot damn
that air is good
and the sun like golden butter on my
body. no racetrack today, nothing but this
beastly and magic
leisure, rolled cigarette dangling
I scratch my belly in the sun
as Paul Hindemith
rides by on a bicycle,
and down the street a lady in a
very red dress
bends down into a laundry basket
rises
hangs a sheet on a line,
bends again, rises, in all that red,
that red like snake skin
clinging moving flashing
hot damn
I keep looking, and
she sees me
pauses bent over basket
clothespin in mouth
she rises with a pair of pink
pan ties
smiles around the
clothespin
waves to me.
what’s next? rape in the streets?
I wave back,
go in,
sit down at the machine
by the window, and now it’s someone’s
violin concerto in D,
and a pretty black girl in very tight pants
walking a hound,
they stop outside my window,
look in;
she has on dark shades
and her mouth opens a little, then she and the dog
move on.
someone might have bombed cities for this or
sold apples in the
rain.
but whoever is responsible, today I wish to
thank him
all the
way.
my failure
I think of de vils in hell
and stare at a
beautiful vase of
flowers
as the woman in my bedroom
angrily switches the light
on and off.
we have had a very bad
argument
and I sit in here smoking
cigarettes from
India
as on the radio an
opera singer’s prayers are
not in my
language.
outside, the window to
my left reveals the night
lights of the
city and I only wish
I had the courage to
break through this simple horror
and make things well
again
but my petty anger
prevents
me.
I realize hell is only what we
create,
smoking these cigarettes,
waiting here,
wondering here,
while in the other room
she continues to
sit and
switch the light
on and off,
on and
off.
a boy and his dog
there’s Barry in his ripped walking shorts
he’s on Thorazine
is 24
looks 38
lives with his mother in the same
apartment building
and they fight like married folk.
he wears dirty white t-shirts
and every time he gets a new dog
he names him “Brownie.”
he’s like an old woman really.
he’ll see me getting into my Volks.
“hey, ya goin’ ta work?”
“oh, no Barry, I don’t work. I’m going to
the racetrack.”
“yeah?”
he walks over to the car window.
“ya heard them last night?”
“who?”
“them! they were playin’ that shit all night!
I couldn’t sleep! they played until one-thirty!
didn’t cha hear ’em?”
“no, but I’m in the back, Barry, you’re up
front.”
we live in east Hollywood among the massage parlors,
adult bookstores and the sex film theatres.
“yeah,” says Barry. “I don’t know what this neighborhood
is comin’ to! ya know those other people in
the front
unit?”
“yes.”
“well, I saw through their curtains! and ya know what
they were doin’?”
“no, Barry.”
“this!” he says and then takes his right forefinger and
pokes it against a vein in his left arm.
“really?”
“yeah! and if it ain’t that, now we got all these
drunks in the neighborhood!”
“look, Barry, I’ve got to get to the racetrack.”