I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.
summer was over.
something’s knocking at the door
a great white light dawns across the
continent
as we fawn over our failed traditions,
often kill to preserve them
or sometimes kill just to kill.
it doesn’t seem to matter: the answers dangle just
out of reach,
out of hand, out of mind.
the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.
it is a waiting without hope, more like
a prayer for unmerited grace.
it all looks more and more like the same old
movie.
the actors are different but the plot’s the same:
senseless.
we should have known, watching our fathers.
we should have known, watching our mothers.
they did not know, they too were not prepared to
teach.
we were too naive to ignore their
counsel
and now we have embraced their
ignorance as our
own.
we are them, multiplied.
we are their unpaid debts.
we are bankrupt
in money and
in spirit.
there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the
edge
and will
at any moment
tumble down to join the rest
of us,
the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly
corrupt.
a great white light dawns across the
continent,
the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,
as grotesque and ultimately
unlivable
our 21st century
struggles to beborn.
his wife, the painter
There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.
“I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are at work.”
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he
fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like
a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.
He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than
his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he
self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.
Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.) Paris,
Bibliothe`que Nationale.
“She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”
“What is it? A love affair?”
“Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”
I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a
lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,
and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that
clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…
men drive cars and paint their houses,
but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.
Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.
Paris, Louvre
“I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”
“Are you still reading Freud?”
“Page 299.”
She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one
arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the
snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve
time and the dog.
About church: the trouble with a mask is it
never changes.
So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.
So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs
and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the
wind like the end of a tunnel.
He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some
segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.
When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches
warmer and more blood-real than the dove.
Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.
Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.
He burned away in sleep.
on the sidewalk and in the sun
I have seen an old man around town recently
carrying an enormous pack.
he uses a walking stick
and moves up and down the streets
with this pack strapped to his back.
I keep seeing him.
if he’d only throw that pack away, I think,
he’d have a chance, not much of a chance
but a chance.
and he’s in a tough district—east Hollywood.
they aren’t going to give him a
dry bone in east Hollywood.
he is lost. with that pack.
on the sidewalk and in the sun.
god almighty, old man, I think, throw away that
pack.
then I drive on, thinking of my own
problems.
the last time I saw him he was not walking.
it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent,
the pack still strapped to his back.
I slowed down to look at his face.
I had seen one or two other men in my life
with looks on their faces like
that.
I speeded up and turned on the
radio.
I knew that look.
I would never see him again.
the elephants of Vietnam
first they used to, he told me,
gun and bomb the elephants,
you could hear their screams over all the other sounds;
but you flew high to bomb the people,
you never saw it,
just a little flash from way up
but with the elephants
you could watch it happen
and hear how they screamed;
I’d tell my buddies, listen, you guys
stop that,
but they just laughed
as the elephants scattered
throwing up their trunks (if they weren’t blown off )
opening their mouths
wide and
kicking their dumb clumsy legs
as blood ran out of big holes in their bellies.
then we’d fly back,
mission completed.
we’d get everything:
convoys, dumps, bridges, people, elephants and
all the rest.
he told me later, I
felt bad about the
elephants.
dark night poem
they say that
nothing is wasted:
either that
or
it all is.
(uncollected)
the last days of the suicide kid
I can see myself now
after all these suicide days and nights,
being wheeled out of one of those sterile rest homes
(of course, this is only if I get famous and lucky)
by a subnormal and bored nurse…
there I am sitting upright in my wheelchair…
almost blind, eyes rolling backward into the dark part of my skull looking
for th
e mercy of death…
“Isn’t it a lovely day, Mr. Bukowski?”
“O, yeah, yeah…”
the children walk past and I don’t even exist
and lovely women walk by
with big hot hips
and warm buttocks and tight hot everything
praying to be loved
and I don’t even
exist…
“It’s the first sunlight we’ve had in 3 days,
Mr. Bukowski.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.”
there I am sitting upright in my wheelchair,
myself whiter than this sheet of paper,
bloodless,
brain gone, gamble gone, me, Bukowski,
gone…
“Isn’t it a lovely day, Mr. Bukowski?”
“O, yeah, yeah…” pissing in my pajamas, slop drooling out of
my mouth.
2 young schoolboys run by—
“Hey, did you see that old guy?”
“Christ, yes, he made me sick!”
after all the threats to do so
somebody else has committed suicide for me
at last.
the nurse stops the wheelchair, breaks a rose from a nearby bush, puts it in my hand.
I don’t even know
what it is. it might as well be my pecker
for all the good
it does.
tabby cat
he has on blue jeans and tennis shoes
and walks with two young girls
about his age.
every now and then he leaps
into the air and
clicks his heels together.
he’s like a young colt
but somehow he also reminds me
more of a tabby cat.
his ass is soft and
he has no more on his mind
than a gnat.
he jumps along behind his girls
clicking his heels together.
then he pulls the hair of one
runs over to the other and
squeezes her neck.
he has fucked both of them and
is pleased with himself.
it has all happened
so easily for him.
and I think, ah,
my little tabby cat
what nights and days
wait for you.
your soft ass
will be your doom.
your agony
will be endless
and the girls
who are yours now
will soon belong to other men
who didn’t get their cookies
and cream so easily and
so early.
the girls are practicing on you
the girls are practicing for other men
for someone out of the jungle
for someone out of the lion cage.
I smile as
I watch you walking along
clicking your heels together.
my god, boy, I fear for you
on that night
when you first find out.
it’s a sunny day now.
jump
while you
can.
metamorphosis
a girlfriend came in
built me a bed
scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor
scrubbed the walls
vacuumed
cleaned the toilet
the bathtub
scrubbed the bathroom floor
and cut my toenails and
my hair.
then
all on the same day
the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet
and the toilet
and the gas man fixed the heater
and the phone man fixed the phone.
now I sit here in all this perfection.
it is quiet.
I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends.
I felt better when everything was in
disorder.
it will take me some months to get back to
normal:
I can’t even find a roach to commune with.
I have lost my rhythm.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t eat.
I have been robbed of
my filth.
a poem is a city
a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a city asking a clock why,
a poem is a city burning,
a poem is a city under guns
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city where God rides naked
through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away
the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter…
a poem is this city now,
50 miles from nowhere,
9:09 in the morning,
the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
no police, no lovers, walking the streets,
this poem, this city, closing its doors,
barricaded, almost empty,
mournful without tears, aging without pity,
the hardrock mountains,
the ocean like a lavender flame,
a moon destitute of greatness,
a small music from broken windows…
a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
a poem is the world…
and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor’s scrutiny,
and night is elsewhere
and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on gallows
as small men rant at things
they cannot do.
a smile to remember
we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, “be happy, Henry!”
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-2 frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.
my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?”
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw.
one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled.
a free 25-page booklet
dying for a beer dying
for and of life
on a windy afternoon in Hollywood
listening to symphony music from my little red radio
on the floor.
a friend said,
“all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk
and lay down
somebody will pick you up
somebody will take care of you.”
I look out the window at the sidewalk
I see something walking on the sidewalk
she wouldn’t lay down there,
only in special places for special people with special $$$$
and
&nb
sp; special ways
while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in
Hollywood,
nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the
sidewalk
moving it past your famished window
she’s dressed in the finest cloth
she doesn’t care what you say
how you look what you do