good men
neither talk about their virtues or
their possibilities,
—strike deep here,
catch fish, headaches, sores, blisters,
traffic tickets, tooth decay, hatred from
lesbians, the surgeon’s brown
finger—
if death is so fearful
then life must be
good?
dandy then, babe, genuinely
traginew, and
I’ve found out why men
sign their names to their
works—
not that they created them
but more
than the others did
not.
even the sun was afraid
they’d stuck him in the shoulder and
he came out
pissed—
feeling all the space of ground
feeling the sunshine
and
looking for somebody.
it stood there.
it seemed that even the sun was afraid of the
bull.
the matador screamed something
shook and flagged the cape.
the bull came at him.
he gave him the cape. but the mat did not get very
close.
then the bull saw the padded
horse, the blindfolded horse,
and he trotted over
and began working his horns against the horse’s
side and underside.
the pic
there on top of the horse
lanced him good
he stuck him deep and hard with the
pole
really muscling it in
screwing it in deep
right in the top part of the back there
up near the neck.
this makes the bull go more for the horse—
he probably thinks the horse is doing it to him—
and as he goes more for the horse
he gets drilled more and more
by the chickenshit
lance.
the bull left the horse
went for the cape
then came back to the horse.
then he got another drilling by the
pic.
he does not any longer quite look like the
bull who first ran into the ring.
but they haven’t cut him down enough
they have something else for
him: the banderillas.
short sharp pieces that are jammed into the upper back
and neck, the placement of these does appear
dangerous.
no cape is used and these young Mexican boys
stupid and with dirty
behinds
they leap into the air and make the
placements as the bull runs
by.
we watched them make the
placements.
now the bull was properly ready for the matador to be
brave.
the neck and back muscles were severed, shredded in
many places.
the head came
down.
Harry took a drink. “these Mexican bulls aren’t any
good. you oughta see the Spanish bulls. they got horns
like this”:
he showed me how they had horns like that. with his
hands. then we both had a
drink.
the matador did not seem to get in very
close. the bull kept getting in those
tired and desperate lunges at the cape
getting more and more winded
more and more
useless.
each of the matador’s movements had some meaning, some
name. the Mexicans knew it. the drunken Americans in the
shade with good jobs and subnormal wives
didn’t know anything. they rooted for the
bull.
they didn’t know that it took guts
to even do a bad job with the bull.
well, this bull was bad and the matador was bad
but the matador was worse than the
bull, and I guess that’s about as bad as the act can
get.
except when the bull is so much less worse than the
matador and the mat gets gored and the Americans go
home happy and
fuck all night
trying to forget about the job in the
kill time came. the mat knew what to do. he knew the
spot. it was like running a hot poker into a
barrel of loose tin foil.
the bull
beaten and stabbed about the neck and back
winded totally by ripping at a vision of a
red cape that only
gave, gave, gave
folded over the horn forever—
the bull was winded spiritually as
well.
and finally stood
disgusted and doomed
looking
LOOKING.
we had another
drink. we knew the plot, the hero, the whole
fucking thing. the sword went
in.
but it wasn’t
over.
the bull stood there.
and with the sword cutting his vitals
they came up.
4 or 5 Mexicans with dirty
behinds. including the
mat.
and they turned
him. flicked their capes at
him. punched him on the
nose.
still he wouldn’t
fall.
they were trying to push him into death
but he was hanging
in.
and every now and then
the head would remember
and give a lunge of
horn and
they would step back
remembering their own deaths.
then the mat came up
pulled the sword
out, stuck it home
again.
still no good.
the bull would not go
down.
we had another drink.
“you see,” said Harry, “they keep turning him. that
sword is cutting him. every time they make him move,
the sword cuts again.”
finally somebody took his foot and
kicked the bull over and the bull
fell down.
but still
it wasn’t any
good.
the bull kept kicking his
legs, trying to get
up. he wouldn’t
quit.
so then a little fat chap came
out. he was all dressed in white and wore a little
white butcher’s cap. he seemed quite
angry.
he had a short blade and walked up
and very angry and quick
he chopped and chopped and chopped and
chopped. it appeared that he was chopping at the
bull’s head, his
brain.
the bull couldn’t get at the boy in the
butcher’s cap. he had to
take it. finally one of the chops
took.
you could SEE the bull
die. the bull gave it
up. the crowd
cheered.
Harry took a
drink, that was the end of that
pint. and that
matador.
“what’s the name of the next
bull?” I asked
Harry.
“I don’t know. the light is
bad.”
anyhow, the next bull came
out.
we had one more pint and the
; drive back in.
on a grant
…an ocean liner
the Captain smiles and farts and knows my
name
the sea is boiling and smells of
torn chunks and warm raw meat
and
half-daft sick spiders try to
wind their dead legs around each other
around everything
but they tangle off slide off drift off
losing legs against the prow
and wanting to scream and not being able to
scream
while
I am on the grant from a University
and
translating Rimbaud and Lorca and
Günter Grass over and over
again
then
after a conversation on Proust and
Patchen I rape a
rich beautiful girl in my cabin
and
afterwards she turns into a
dead peach tree which I
hang on the wall
then
I awaken in a small dirty bedroom and the
woman walks in:
“listen, I need a stroller. the kid is
getting too heavy to carry.”
“o.k., o.k.”
“but when? when?”
“not today. too god damned
tired.”
“tomorrow?”
“tomorrow, sure.”
finish
the hearse comes through the room filled with
the beheaded, the disappeared, the living
mad.
the flies are a glue of sticky paste
their wings will not
lift.
I watch an old woman beat her cat
with a broom.
the weather is unendurable
a dirty trick by
God.
the water has evaporated from the
toilet bowl
the telephone rings without
sound
the small limp arm petering against the
bell.
I see a boy on his
bicycle
the spokes collapse
the tires turn into
snakes and melt
away.
the newspaper is oven-hot
men murder each other in the streets
without reason.
the worst men have the best jobs
the best men have the worst jobs or are
unemployed or locked in
madhouses.
I have 4 cans of food left.
air-conditioned troops go from house to
house
from room to room
jailing, shooting, bayoneting
the people.
we have done this to ourselves, we
deserve this
we are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting
it is as if the sun were a mind that has
given up on us.
I go out on the back porch
and look across the sea of dead plants
now thorns and sticks shivering in a
windless sky.
somehow I’m glad we’re through
finished—
the works of Art
the wars
the decayed loves
the way we lived each day.
when the troops come up here
I don’t care what they do for
we already killed ourselves
each day we got out of bed.
I go back into the kitchen
spill some hash from a soft
can, it is almost cooked
already
and I sit
eating, looking at my
fingernails.
the sweat comes down behind my
ears and I hear the
shooting in the streets and
I chew and wait
without wonder.
the underground
the place was crowded.
the editor told me,
“Charley get some chairs from upstairs,
there are more chairs upstairs.”
I brought them down and we opened the beer and
the editor said,
“we’re not getting enough advertising,
the boat might go down,”
so they started talking about how to get
advertising.
I kept drinking the beer
and had to piss
and when I got back
the girl next to me said,
“we ought to evacuate the city,
that’s what we ought to do.”
I said, “I’d rather listen to Joseph Haydn.”
she said, “just think of it,
if everybody left the city!”
“they’d only be someplace else
stinking it up,” I said.
“I don’t think you like
people,” she said, pulling her short skirt down
as much as possible.
“just to fuck with,” I said.
then I went to the bar next door and
bought 3 more packs of beer.
when I got back they were talking Revolution.
so here I was back in 1935 again,
only I was old and they were young. I was at least
20 years older than anybody in the room,
and I thought, what the hell am I doing
here?
soon the meeting ended
and they went out into the night,
those young ones
and I picked up the phone, I got
John T.,
“John, you o.k.? I’m low tonight.
suppose I come over and get
drunk?”
“sure, Charley, we’ll be waiting.”
“Charley,” said the editor, “I guess we’ve got to
put the chairs back
upstairs.”
we carried the chairs back upstairs
the
revolution was
over.
from the Dept. of English
100 million Chinese bugs on the stairway to
hell,
come drink with me
rub my back with me;
this filth-pitched room,
floor covered with yellow newspapers
3 weeks old; bottle caps, a red
pencil, a rip of
toilet paper, these odd bits of
broken things;
the flies worry me as ice cream ladies
walk past my window;
at night I sleep, try to sleep
between mounds of stinking laundry;
ghosts come out,
play dirty games, evil games, games of horror with
my mind;
in the morning there is blood on the sheet
from a broken sore upon my
back.
putting on a shirt that rips across my
back, rotten rag of a thing,
and putting on pants with a rip in the
crotch, I find in the mailbox
(along with other threats):
“Dear Mr. Bukowski:
Would like to see more of your poems for
possible inclusion in
_____Poetry Review.
How’s it going?”
footnote upon the construction of the masses:
some people are young and nothing
else and
some people are old and nothing
else
and some people are in between and
just in between.
and if the flies wore clothes on their
backs
and all the buildings burned in
golden fire,
if heaven shook like a bell
y
dancer
and all the atom bombs began to
cry,
some people would be young and nothing
else and
some people old and nothing
else,
and the rest would be the same
the rest would be the same.
the few who are different
are eliminated quickly enough
by the police, by their mothers, their
brothers, others; by
themselves.
all that’s left is what you
see.
it’s
hard.
kaakaa & other immolations
wondrous, sure, kid, you want more
applejuice? how can you drink that goddamned
stuff? I hate it. what? no, I’m not Dr.
Vogel. I’m the daddy. your old man. where’s mama?
she’s out joining an artist’s colony, oh, that’s a place
where people go who aren’t
artists. yes, that’s the way it works almost
everywhere, sometimes you can go into a hospital and
it can be 40 floors high and there won’t be a doctor in
there, and hard to find a nurse either.
what’s a hospital? a hospital is just a bunch of
disconnected buttons, dying people and very sophisticated and
comfortable orderlies, but the whole world is like this: