Dedicated to Henry Charles Bukowski
Bukowski quotes on life, death, love, writing....
a very miraculous thing just happened:
my beerbottle flipped over backwards
and landed on its bottom on the floor,
and I have set it upon the table to foam down,
but the photos were not so lucky today
and there is a small slit along the leather
of my left shoe, but it’s all very simple:
we cannot acquire too much: there are laws
we know nothing of, all manner of nudges
set us to burning or freezing; what sets
the blackbird in the cat’s mouth
is not for us to say, or why some men
are jailed like pet squirrels
while others nuzzle in enormous breasts
through endless nights—this is the
task and the terror, and we are not
taught why. still, it’s lucky the bottle
landed straightside up, and although
I have one of wine and one of whiskey,
this foretells, somehow, a good night,
and perhaps tomorrow my nose will be longer:
new shoes, less rain, more poems.
the wind blows hard to night
and it’s a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle
of red.
it’s when you’re on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.
this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.
we just forget
ours.
in either case
it’s a hard
cold
wind.
The Pleasures of the Damned - Charles Bukowski
(Source: plagiarist.com)
another bed
another women
more curtains
another bathroom
another kitchen
other eyes
other hair
other
feet and toes.
everybodys looking.
the eternal search.
you stay in bed
she gets dressed for work
and you wonder what happened
to the last one
and the one after that…
it’s all so comfortable-
this love making
this sleeping together
the gentle kindness…
after she leaves you get up and use her
bathroom,
it’s all so intimate and strange.
you go back to bed and
sleep another hour.
when you leave its with sadness
but you’ll se her again
whether it works or not.
you drive down to the shore and sit
in your car. it’s almost noon.
-another bed, other ears, other
ear rings, other mouths, other slippers, other
dresses
colors, doors, phone numbers.
you were once strong enough to live alone.
for a man nearing sixty you should be more
sensible.
you start the car and shift,
thinking, I’ll phone Jeanie when I get in,
I haven’t seen her since Friday.
my father had memorized many sayings that he liked to
repeat over and over:
“if you can’t succeed, suck eggs!”
“my country, right or wrong!”
“early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy,
wealthy and wise!”
my mother just smiled as he mouthed these
pearls of wisdom.
me?
I thought, this man is a fool.
“any man who wants a job can get one!” was one
of his favorites during the Depression years.
almost everything he said was stupid.
he called my mother “mama.”
“mama, we gotta move out of this neighborhood!”
“why, daddy?”
“because I saw one, mama!”
“one what, daddy?”
“a nigger…”
another one of his favorites was:
“eenie, meanie, miney, mo, catch a nigger by the
toe, if he hollers make him pay, 50 dollars every
day!”
he never voiced these aphorisms while sitting down
but always while marching smartly about the
house.
“God helps those who help themselves!”
“you listen to your father, Henry,” my mother would
tell me.
that poor woman, she meant it.
“don’t do as I do,” he’d shout, “but do as I
say!”
I ended up doing neither.
and the day I looked down at him in his
coffin
I almost expected him to say something
but he didn’t so I spoke up for
him:
“dead men tell no more tales.”
thank Christ, I had heard enough.
then
they closed the lid and my uncle Jack and
I went out for hamburgers and fries.
we sat there with the food in front of us.
“your father was a good man,” Uncle Jack
said.
“Jack,” I replied, “good for what?”
these things that we support most well
have nothing to do with us,
and we do with them
out of boredom or fear or money
or cracked intelligence;
our circle and our candle of light
being small,
so small we cannot bear it,
we heave out with Idea
and lose the Center:
all wax without the wick,
and we see names that once meant
wisdom,
like signs into ghost towns,
and only the graves are real.
(Source: americanpoems.com)
against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn’t have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.
(Source: writersalmanac.publicradio.org)
