чарльз буковски

******

laugh literary

listen, man, don’t tell me about the poems you
sent, we didn’t receive them,
we are very careful with manuscripts
we bake them
burn them
laugh at them
vomit on them
pour beer over them
but generally we return
them
they are
so
inane.
ah, we believe in Art,
we need it
surely,
but, you know, there are many people
(most people)
playing and fornicating with the
Arts
who only crowd the stage
with their generous unforgiving
vigorous
mediocrity.
our subscription rates are $4 a year.
please read our magazine before
submitting.

******

deathbed blues

if you can’t stand the heat, he says, get out of the
kitchen. you know who said that?
Harry Truman.
I’m not in the kitchen, I say, I’m in the
oven.
my editor is a difficult man.
I sometimes phone him in moments of doubt.
look, he answers, you’ll be lighting cigars with ten dollar
bills, you’ll have a redhead on one arm and a blonde
on the other.
other times he’ll say, look, I think I’m going to hire
V.K. as my associate editor. we’ve got to prune off
5 poets here somewhere. I’m going to leave it up
to him. (V.K. is a very imaginative poet who believes I’ve
knifed him from N.Y.C. to the shores of Hawaii.)
look, kid, I phone my editor, can you speak German?
no, he says.
well, anyhow, I say, I need some good new tires, cheap.
so you know where I can get some good new tires, cheap?
I’ll phone you in 30 minutes, he says, will you be in
in 30 minutes?
I can’t afford to go anywhere, I say.
he says, they say you were drunk at that reading
in Oregon.
ugly gossips, I answer.
were you?
I don’t
remember.
one day he phones me:
you’re not hitting the ball anymore. you are hitting the
bottle and fighting with all these
women. you know we got a good kid on the bench,
he’s aching to get in there
he hits from both sides of the plate
he can catch anything that ain’t hit over the wall
he’s coached by Duncan, Creeley, Wakoski
and he can rhyme, he knows
images, similes, metaphors, figures, conceits,
assonance, alliteration, metrics, yes
metrics like, you know—
iambic, trochaic, anapestic, spondaic,
he knows caesura, denotation, connotation, personification,
diction, voice, paradox, rhetoric, tone and
coalescence…
holy shit, I say, hang up and take a good hit of
Old Grandad. Harry’s still alive
according to the papers. but I decide rather than
getting new tires to get
a set of retreads instead.

******

on the circuit

it was up in San Francisco
after my poetry reading.
it had been a nice crowd
I had gotten my money
I had this place upstairs
there was some drinking
and this guy started beating up on a fag
I tried to stop him
and the guy broke a window
deliberately.
I told them all to
get out
and she started hollering down to the guy
who had beat on the fag
and he kept calling her name back up
and then I remembered she had vanished for an hour
before the reading.
she did those things.
maybe not bad things
but consistently careless things
and I told her we were through
and to get out
and I went to bed
then hours later she walked in
and I said, what the hell are you doing here?
she was all wild, hair down in her face,
you’re too callous, I said, I don’t want you.
it was dark and she leaped at me:
I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!
I was still too drunk to defend myself
and she had me down on the kitchen floor
and she clawed my face and
bit a hole in my arm.
then I went back to bed and listened to her heels
going down the hill.

******

my friend, andre

this kid used to teach at Kansas U.
then they moved him out
he went to a bean factory
then he and his wife moved to the coast
she got a job and worked while
he looked for a job as an actor.
I really want to be an actor, he told me,
that’s all I want to be.
he came by with his wife.
he came by alone.
the streets around here are full of guys who
want to be actors.
I saw him yesterday.
he was rolling cigarettes.
I poured him some white wine.
my wife is getting tired of waiting, he said,
I’m going to teach karate.
his hands were swollen from hitting
bricks and walls and doors.
he told me about some of the great oriental
fighters. there was one guy so good
he could turn his head 180 degrees
to see who was behind him. that’s very hard to do,
he said.
further: it’s more difficult to fight 4 men properly placed
than to fight many more. when you have many more
they get in each other’s way, and a good fighter who has
strength and agility can do well.
some of the great fighters, he said,
even suck their balls up into their bodies.
this can be done—to some extent—because there are
natural cavities in the body…. if you stand upsidedown
you will notice this.
I gave him a little more white wine,
then he left.
you know, sometimes making it with a typewriter
isn’t so painful
after all.

******

wet night

the rag.
she sat there, glooming.
I couldn’t do anything with her.
it was raining.
she got up and left.
well, hell, here it is again, I thought
I picked up my drink and turned the radio up,
took the lampshade off the lamp
and smoked a cheap black bitter cigar
imported from Germany.
there was a knock on the door
and I opened the door
a little man stood in the rain
and he said,
have you seen a pigeon on your porch?
I told him I hadn’t seen a pigeon on my porch
and he said if I saw a pigeon on my porch
to let him know.
I closed the door
sat down
and then a black cat leaped through the
window and jumped on my
lap and purred, it was a beautiful animal
and I took it into the kitchen and we both ate a
slice of ham.
then I turned off all the lights
and went to bed
and that black cat went to bed with me
and it purred
and I thought, well, somebody likes me,
then the cat started pissing,
it pissed all over me and all over the sheets,
the piss rolled across my belly and slid down my sides
and I said: hey, what’s wrong with you?
I picked up the cat and walked him to the door
and threw him out into the rain
and I thought, that’s very strange, that cat
pissing on me
his piss was cold as the rain.
then I phoned her
and I said, look, what’s wrong with you? have you lost
your god damned mind?
I hung up and pulled the sheets off the bed
and got in and lay there listening to the rain.
sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things
and sometimes it’s best to lie very still
and try not to think at all
about anything.
that cat belonged to somebody
it had a flea collar.
I don’t know about the
woman.

******

the sound of human lives

strange warmth, hot and cold females,
I make good love, but love isn’t just
sex. most females I’ve known are
ambitious, and I like to lie around
on large comfortable pillows at 3 o’clock
in the afternoon, I like to watch the sun
through the leaves of a bush outside
while the world out there
holds away from me, I know it so well, all
those dirty pages, and I like to lie around
my belly up to the ceiling after making love
everything flowing in:
it’s so easy to be easy—if you let it, that’s all
that’s necessary.
but the female is strange, she is very
ambitious—shit! I can’t sleep away the day!
all we do is eat! make love! sleep! eat! make love!
my dear, I say, there are men out there
now
picking tomatoes, lettuce, even cotton,
there are men and women dying under the sun,
there are men and women dying in factories
for nothing, a pittance…
I can hear the sound of human lives being ripped to
pieces…
you don’t know how lucky we
are…
but you’ve got it made, she says,
your poems…
my love gets out of bed.
I hear her in the other room.
the typewriter is working.
I don’t know why people think effort and energy
have anything to do with
creation.
I suppose that in matters like politics, medicine,
history and religion
they are mistaken
also.
I turn on my belly and fall asleep with my
ass to the ceiling for a change.

******

burned

the kid went back to New York City to live with a woman
he met in a kibbutz.
he left his mother at the age of
32, a well-kept fellow, sense of humor and never
wore the same pair of shorts
more than one day. there he was
in the Puerto Rican section, she had a
job. he wanted iron bars on the windows and
ate too much fried chicken at 10 a.m.
in the morning after she went to
work. he had some money saved out of the
years and he fucked but he was really
afraid of
pussy.
I was sitting with Eileen in Hollywood
and I said:
I ought to warn the kid
so that when she turns on him
he’ll be
ready.
no, she said, let him be happy.
I let him be
happy.
now he’s back living with his
mother, he weighs three hundred and ten pounds
and eats all the time
and laughs all the time
but you ought to see his
eyes…
the eyes are sitting in the center of all that
flesh…
he bites into a chicken leg:
I loved her, he says to me,
I loved her.

******

hell hath no fury…

she was in her orange Volks waiting
as I walked up the street
with 2 six packs and a pint of scotch
and she jumped out
and began grabbing the beerbottles and
smashing them on the pavement
and she got the pint of scotch and
smashed that too,
saying: ho! so you were going to get her
drunk on this and fuck her!
I walked in the doorway where the other woman
stood halfway up the stairs,
then she ran in from the street
and up the stairs and hit the other woman
with her purse, saying:
he’s my man! he’s my man!
and then she ran out and
jumped into her orange Volks
and drove away.
I came out with a broom
and began sweeping up the glass
when I heard a sound
and there was the orange Volks
running on the sidewalk
and on me—
I managed to leap up against a wall
as it went by.
then I took the broom and began sweeping up
the glass again,
and suddenly she was standing there;
she took the broom and broke it into three
pieces,
then she found an unbroken beerbottle
and threw it at the glass window of the door.
it made a clean round hole
and the other woman shouted down from the
stairway: for God’s sake, Bukowski, go with
her!
I got into the orange Volks and we
drove off together.

******

pull a string, a puppet moves…

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand—
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha…
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you’ll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she’ll ask:
my god, what’s the matter?
and you’ll answer: I don’t know,
I don’t know…

******

tougher than corned beef hash—

the motion of the human heart:
strangled over Missouri;
sheathed in hot wax in Boston;
burned like a potato in Norfolk;
lost in the Allegheny Mountains;
found again in a 4-poster mahogany bed
in New Orleans;
drowned and stirred with pinto beans
in El Paso;
hung on a cross like a drunken dog
in Denver;
cut in half and toasted in
Kalamazoo;
found cancerous on a fishing boat
off the coast of Mexico;
tricked and caged at Daytona Beach;
kicked by a nursery maid
in a green and white ghingham dress,
waiting table at a North Carolina
bus stop;
rubbed in olive oil and goat-piss
by a chess-playing hooker in the East
Village;
painted red, white, and blue
by an act of Congress;
torpedoed by a dyed blonde
with the biggest ass in Kansas;
gutted and gored by a woman
with the soul of a bull
in East Lansing;
petrified by a girl with tiny fingers,
she had one tooth missing,
upper front, and pumped gas
in Mesa;
the motion of the human heart goes on
and on
and on and on
for a while.

******

7.
I was a bad writer, I killed N.C. because I made
more of him than there was, and then the ins
made more of my book than there was. there have
been only 3 bad writers in acceptable
American
literature. Drieser, of course, was the worst.
then we had Thomas Wolfe, and then we had me. but
when I try to choose between me and Wolfe, I’ve
got to take Wolfe. I mean as the worst. I like
to think of what Capote, another bad writer said
about me: he just typewrites. sometimes even
bad writers tell the truth.

******

dreamlessly

old grey-haired waitresses
in cafes at night
have given it up,
and as I walk down sidewalks of
light and look into windows
of nursing homes
I can see that it is no longer
with them.
I see people sitting on park benches
and I can see by the way they
sit and look
that it is gone.
I see people driving cars
and I see by the way
they drive their cars
that they neither love nor are
loved—
nor do they consider
sex. it is all forgotten
like an old movie.
I see people in department stores and
supermarkets
walking down aisles
buying things
and I can see by the way their clothing
fits them and by the way they walk
and by their faces and their eyes
that they care for nothing
and that nothing cares
for them.
I can see a hundred people a day
who have given up
entirely.
if I go to a racetrack
or a sporting event
I can see thousands
that feel for nothing or
no one
and get no feeling
back.
everywhere I see those who
crave nothing but
food, shelter, and
clothing; they concentrate
on that,
dreamlessly.
I do not understand why these people do not
vanish
I do not understand why these people do not
expire
why the clouds
do not murder them
or why the dogs
do not murder them
or why the flowers and the children
do not murder them,
I do not understand.
I suppose they are murdered
yet I can’t adjust to the
fact of them
because they are so
many.
each day,
each night,
there are more of them
in the subways and
in the buildings and
in the parks
they feel no terror
at not loving
or at not
being loved
so many many many
of my fellow
creatures.

******

palm leaves

at exactly 12:00 midnight
1973-74
Los Angeles
it began to rain on the
palm leaves outside my window
the horns and firecrackers
went off
and it thundered.
I’d gone to bed at 9 p.m.
turned out the lights
pulled up the covers—
their gaiety, their happiness,
their screams, their paper hats,
their automobiles, their women,
their amateur drunks…
New Year’s Eve always terrifies
me
life knows nothing of years.
now the horns have stopped and
the firecrackers and the thunder…
it’s all over in five minutes…
all I hear is the rain
on the palm leaves,
and I think,
I will never understand men,
but I have lived
it through.

******

one for Sherwood Anderson

sometimes I forget about him and his peculiar
innocence, almost idiotic, awkward and mawkish,
he liked walking over bridges and through cornfields.
tonight I think about him, the way the lines were,
one felt space between his lines, air
and he told it so the lines remained
carved there
something like Van Gogh.
he took his time
looking about
sometimes running to save something
leaving everything to save something,
then at other times giving it all away.
he didn’t understand Hemingway’s neon tattoo,
found Faulkner much too clever.
he was a midwestern hick
he took his time.
he was as far away from Fitzgerald as he was
from Paris.
he told stories and left the meaning
open
and sometimes he told meaningless stories
because that was the way it was.
he told the same story again and again
and he never wrote a story that was unreadable.
and nobody ever talks about his life or
his death.

******

nothing

when I was in
the post office
there was a
black girl
there was something
wrong
with her
and
there was something
wrong
with me
one
lunch period
she
walked up to me
and said,
“come on, buy
me a drink.”
so
we walked
across the street
to the
Chinaman’s
and we
had the drink
and
then I said,
“come on, buy
me a drink.”
and
she did
and then we
noticed a guy
passed out in a
corner booth
and she said,
“Jesus Christ,
it’s
Skinny Minny!”
Skinny Minny was
a high yellow
supervisor who had
given me
plenty of trouble
and it
looked strange
to see him there
human enough
to get drunk
like that
“I don’t hate
him
so much
now,” I
told her.
we finished
our drinks
and walked out
to go back to
work
“come on over here,” she
said
and she led me
up a little alley
to a wire
fence
where some
empty cartons
were stacked
it was very
dark and
she pulled over
a carton
sat down and
unzipped me
and began licking me
and then she
had me
in her mouth
sucking
I grabbed the
wire fence
“JESUS, JESUS,
JESUS!”
I came
she zipped me
up
and we walked
back to work
and punched in
late
after that
night
we never went
out together
again
maybe she had
been
playing me
against
some other guy
but Skinny Minny
never looked
as bad
again
I don’t know
what
that night
meant
it probably
didn’t mean
anything
at all
it’s when you
look
for meaning
that you get
confused
about a month
later
she said goodby
and quit
the job
that
made sense.

******

the Indian

the old Indian in Texas
was a handyman in return for
some beans and a shack and some
money for wine.
he didn’t want much.
he didn’t do much.
I knew the rich people who had
hired him: I had married their
granddaughter.
she had everything and wanted
more.
she wore high-heels and
crunched the earth when she
walked. it jolted her
frame.
her hair bounced like a horse’s mane
as she went about.
she told me the Indian’s name
and I saw him mending fences sometimes
a long tan rolled cigarette
hanging from his mouth
and at the most curious
times
a tiny blue puff of smoke
emanated from it.
I liked his face
it had diggings, veins, rivers, burnt areas.
he was never in a hurry.
I wasn’t either
his back looked like it was tied
to a pine board
while I was bent and slumped
weary and with
gut.
there wasn’t much to do on that ranch
for either of us.
I took long walks while my wife
painted oil paintings. she
painted best alone and I respected
that.
I came back each evening with
dust on my
shoes.
in time
in not too long a time
the Indian began to die. he knew
the landscape.
he didn’t want the hospital. he
wanted to die in his shack, he
told them.
they obliged.
he died there
secure
untroubled
and easy.
he wanted to die
there
and he did
with his cigarettes and wine jug.
my wife went on painting
and grandmother went on with her
migraines
and grandfather played old cowboy
songs on the victrola;
listening with a drink in his hand
he asked me,
“you like that one, Hank?”
“yeah, I think it’s good,”
I told him.

******

two drunks

I was trying to write.
I was barely existing.
mostly I typed dirty things
for the girly magazines.
Eddie was trying to paint.
he was barely existing
but he was luckier than
I: he lived in this big
house
with this beautiful girl
who was
taking care of him.
Eddie and I were
drinking together.
we did our work
plenty of it but we
drank plenty too.
he had
all his paintings
down in the cellar
of this house—
hundreds of them
thrown about and
stuck together.
he painted only with
yellow paint run through
with black india ink.
yellow was
my favorite color so
I liked the paintings.
I stayed over there
in the daytime
and drank
and then at night I
went back to my place
and drank some more
and typed.
it was
an exciting time even
though
we were hardly
making it
and the madhouse and/
or skid row were just
around the corner.
we fought and screamed and
drank with strangers
and the sun was always
up or
it was midnight
and either way
it was
raw shit energy.
Eddie liked to
paint to music
and since that was the
way I wrote I
understood it.
“read me some of your
god damned poems…”
I’d read them and
he’d begin
violently ripping
the canvas
with his brush
black across yellow
his beautiful woman watching.
we must have
gone on like that for
two or three months.
one day
I went over
to see Eddie and
his girl
met me
at the door.
“Eddie’s gone,” she
said, “I kicked his
ass out!”
“did he take his paintings?”
“no, I trashed
them!”
she didn’t look
beautiful to me
anymore.
“do you know
where he went?”
“no, and I don’t
give a damn!”
she
closed the door.
Eddie never came by
my place.
every now and then I’d
wonder about him.
I even got drunk
one night and went
back to the house and
tried to make
his x-girlfriend.
I couldn’t do it.
I went back home.
I had to keep
typing.
I was 50 years old
and
didn’t have a job.
I even tried to
paint
but I was
no way near
as good as Eddie.
I went back to
writing dirty stories.
I never saw
Eddie again.
and after a while
I just
forgot about him
until tonight
ten years later.
Eddie, I don’t care
much for people
but you could have
come by
you could have slept on the couch
or the floor.
not much
I know
but yellow is
my favorite color
just in case
you see this poem.

******

bad press

years ago while I was living on DeLongpre Ave.
typing at that window facing the sidewalk
he came by
a college professor
he came by with beer and I drank most of the
beer.
I don’t remember much about the conversation
but I do remember that I wasn’t very excited
by his visit.
one afternoon he came by and I had the flu.
I met him at the door. “I can’t see you,”
I told him.
then I took the 6-pack he was holding from
him and closed the door leaving him
standing there.
many years later now I receive literary magazines
to which I don’t subscribe.
and in them are reviews by this professor of
the anthologies I am in.
the professor always praises many, damns
a few, and when it comes to me he simply
blows me off the page like
cigarette ash that has fallen there.
I really had the flu, you know.
it didn’t kill me but it certainly did appear
to ravage my talents.

******

night school

in the drunk driver’s class
assigned there by division 63
we are given tiny yellow pencils
to take a test
to see if we have been listening
to the instructor.
questions like: the minimum sentence for a
2nd drunk driving conviction is:
a) 48 days
b) 6 months
c) 90 days
there are 9 other questions.
after the instructor leaves the room
the students begin asking the questions:
“hey, how about question 5? that’s a
tough one!”
“did he talk about that?”
“I think it’s 48 days.”
“are you sure?”
“no, but that’s what I’m putting
down.”
one woman circles all 3 answers
on all questions
even though we’ve been told to
select only one.
on our break I go down and
drink a can of beer
outside a liquor store.
I watch a black hooker
on her evening stroll.
a car pulls up.
she walks over and they
talk.
the door opens.
she gets in and
they drive off.
back in class
the students have gotten
to know each other.
they are a not-very-interesting
bunch of drunks and
x-drunks.
I visualize them sitting in a
bar
and I remember why
I started drinking
alone.
the class begins again.
it is discovered that I am
the only one to have gotten
100 percent on the test.
I slouch back in my chair
with my dark shades on.
I am the class
intellectual.

******

overt population

I’ll say one thing: her older sister wrote
more novels than anybody I ever knew but
the novels kept coming back. I read some
of them, or rather—parts of them. maybe
they were good, I didn’t know, I wasn’t a
critic: I didn’t like Tolstoy or Thomas
Mann or Henry James.
anyhow, her novels kept coming back and
her men kept leaving, and she just ate more,
had more babies; she didn’t bathe and seldom
combed her hair and she let the diapers lay
about stinking. and she talked continually
and laughed continually—a highly nervous
laugh—she talked about men and sex
continually and I never criticized her because
I sensed she had enough trouble and
I was living with her younger sister, besides.
but one afternoon when we were visiting, the
older sister said to me: “all right, I know
you’ve had some novels published but I have
these babies, these children, that’s an art,
that’s my art!”
“many people have babies,” I said, “that’s
really not exceptional, it’s rather standard.
but to write a good novel is a rare and an
exceptional thing.”
she leaped up and waved her arms: “oh yeah.
oh yeah? what about your daughter? where
is your daughter now?”
“Santa Monica, California.”
‘“SANTA MONICA? WHAT THE HELL KIND OF FATHER
ARE YOU?”
I no longer see either sister, although
about 2 months ago the younger one phoned
long distance and among other things she
told me that her sister had just mailed
her latest novel off to New York and that
her sister thought it was very good, that
it was the one, that it was the one that
would do it.
I didn’t tell her younger sister that
all of us novelists think that and that
is why there are so many of us.

******

out of the mainstream

after Mickey’s wife goes to work
he walks to the back of the court and starts smoking dope
with Harry the house painter.
Harry the house painter has a cowed dog named
“Pluto”
who whines away the day
at the end of a long rope.
I can’t blame anybody: people get tired of the
mainstream
I sit inside my place
reading the daily newspaper over and over
again.
then I turn on the tv to the
morning soap operas
and I am glad that I don’t live
with any of those women
they are always getting pregnant and are
always unhappy
with their doctors and lawyers.
I snap the set off
consider masturbating
reject that and
take a bath instead.
the phone rings, it’s my
girlfriend: “what are you
doing?”
“nothing.”
“what do you mean, ‘nothing’?”
“I’m in bed.”
“in bed? it’s almost noon.”
“I know.”
“why don’t you take a walk?”
“all right…”
I get up, get dressed and go outside.
I walk south down Western
I walk all the way to Santa Monica Boulevard
go into Sears-Roebuck.
there’s a blue jean sale on.
I purchase a pair for under $10.
I take the escalator down
and in the candy section
I buy a large bag of popcorn.
then I stroll through the hardware section
looking at tools that I have no interest in,
then to the electrical section
where I stand looking at a series of
sunlamps,
jamming the popcorn into my mouth
and feeling like a total
asshole.

******

yes

no matter who I’m with
people always say,
are you still with her?
my average relationship lasts
two and one half years.
with wars
inflation
unemployment
alcoholism
gambling
and my own degenerate nervousness
I think I do well enough.
I like reading the Sunday papers in bed.
I like orange ribbons tied around the cat’s neck.
I like sleeping up against a body that I know well.
I like black slips at the foot of my bed
at 2 in the afternoon.
I like seeing how the photos turned out.
I like to be helped through the holidays:
4th of July, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving,
Christmas, New Year’s.
they know how to ride these rapids
and they are less afraid of love than I am.
they can make me laugh where professional comedians
fail.
there is walking out to buy a newspaper together.
there is much good in being alone
but there is a strange warmth in not being alone.
I like boiled red potatoes.
I like eyes and fingers better than mine that can
get knots out of shoelaces.
I like letting her drive the car on dark nights
when the road and the way have gotten to me,
the car radio on
we light cigarettes and talk about things
and now and then
become silent.
I like hairpins on tables,
on the floor.
I like knowing the same walls
the same people.
I dislike the insane and useless fights which always
occur
and I dislike myself at these times
giving nothing
understanding nothing.
I like boiled asparagus
I like radishes
green onions.
I like to put my car into a car wash.
I like it when I have ten win on a six to one
shot.
I like my radio which keeps playing
Brahms, Beethoven, Mahler.
I like it when there’s a knock on the door and
she’s there.
no matter who I’m with
people always say,
are you still with her?
they must think I bury them in
the Hollywood Hills.

******

on the hustle

I suppose
one of the worst times was
when
after a drunken reading and
an all night party
I promised to appear at
an eleven o’clock English
class
and there they sat
nicely dressed
terribly young
awfully comfortable.
I only wanted to sleep
and I kept the wastebasket
close
in case I
puked.
I think I was in the state of
Nebraska or Illinois or
Ohio.
no more of this,
I thought,
I’ll go back to the factories
if they’ll have me.
“why do you write?”
a young man asked.
“next question,”
I responded.
a sweet birdie with blue eyes
asked, “who are your 3
favorite contemporary
writers?”
I answered, “Henry Chinaski,
Henry Chinaski and Henry…”
somebody asked,
“what do you think about Norman
Mailer?”
I told them that I didn’t think
about Norman Mailer and then I
asked, “doesn’t anybody have a
beer?”
there was this silence, this
continuing silence and the class
and the prof looked at me and I
looked at them.
then the sweet birdie with
the blue eyes
asked,
“won’t you read us
one of your poems?”
and then that’s when I
got up and walked
out
I left them in there
with their prof
and I walked down
through the campus
looking at the
young girls
their hair
their legs
their eyes
their behinds…
they all look so good,
I thought, but
they’re going to grow up
into nothing but
trouble…
suddenly I braced myself
against a tree and began
puking…
“look at that old
man,” a sweet birdie with
brown eyes said to a sweet
birdie with pale green eyes,
“he’s really
fucked-up…”
the truth, at
last.

******

attack and retreat

read to them
read to them and drink wine, let the young girls
dream of sucking your soul out of your cock
read to them
read to them and drink your wine, get paid in cash,
leave and let somebody else drive the car.
but before that
when you
read to them
read them the new ones so you
won’t be bored
and when the applause comes
and the young girls look at you
with their hot bright eyes
remember when you were starving in small
rooms
remember the only time anybody wanted your
autograph was when you signed in
at the drunk tank
remember when other young girls thought you
were a roach.
read to them
read to them and drink your wine, and remember
all the poets who think that reading is
an important and a holy thing;
these are the poets who hate you,
these are the poets who read to 8 or 12 or
14 people.
these are the poets who write of
love and honesty and courage
or believe that they do.
leave the young girls to them, they need
the young girls for they have nothing
else.
take the cash and jam it
into your side pocket and get out and get away,
get back to your place, lock in.
you will be contacted: they’ll want to issue a phonograph
record of the reading.
give the contract to your lawyer.
start in on novel #
4.

******

it’s strange

it’s strange when famous people die
whether they have fought the good fight or
the bad one.
it’s strange when famous people die
whether we like them or not
they are like old buildings old streets
things and places that we are used to
which we accept simply because they’re
there.
it’s strange when famous people die
it’s like the death of a father or
a pet cat or dog.
and it’s strange when famous people are killed
or when they kill themselves.
the trouble with the famous is that they must
be replaced and they can never quite be
replaced, and that gives us this unique
sadness.
it’s strange when famous people die
the sidewalks look different and our
children look different and our bedmates
and our curtains and our automobiles.
it’s strange when famous people die:
we become troubled.

******

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