what?
his words were now
very pale.
they spread across the page
like a mist
filling it
but saying
very little.
he didn’t seem to be the
same man.
where had he gone?
why do
such deaths seem
mysterious?
it’s well that
new poets come along
new quarterbacks
new matadors
new dictators
new revolutionaries
new butchers
new pawnbrokers.
because spiritual death arrives
much more quickly and unexpectedly than
physical demise.
I drop his new book
into the wastebasket.
I don’t want it
around.
he was now a
successful writer
which meant
that his work
no longer made
anybody
angry
disgusted
or sad.
never made
anybody
laugh
never made
anybody
feel that rush of wonder
while reading
it.
but in a world
where even
the disappearance
of the dinosaur
remains a mystery
we should accept
the mysterious fact of
the vanishing poet.
and when we accept
that
we are simply
making way for
our own final
invisibility.
our deep sleep
I’ve always been a sucker for the
old ones: Céline, Hemingway, Dreiser,
Sherwood Anderson, e. e. cummings,
Jeffers, Auden, W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens,
Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Carson
McCullers…and some others.
Our current moderns
leave me quite
unsatisfied.
there is neither lean nor
fat in their efforts, no pace,
no gamble, no joy.
it’s work reading them, hard
work,
there is much pretense
and even some clever con
behind their productions.
I have no idea what has
happened to the creative
writer since the 1940s.
there has been a half century
of utter pap.
why?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
there has been little to
read
for some time now.
I have been able to
read only the newspapers
and the
Racing Form.
all those books printed,
a million books
printed
and nothing to
read.
a half century shot to
shit.
we deserve nothing
and that’s what we have
now.
the sorry history of myself
this is a terrible way to live:
surrounded by
the ever-
irascible,
coldhearted and
nearly mad.
but my early experiences were
quite similar.
I should be adjusted to it
all by now
from my angry boiling
petty father
to
the slew of females
who came later
all consumed by
depression,
useless rage,
screeching and
nonsensical
self-
pity.
happiness and simple joy
for them all seemed to be
simply diseases to be
eradicated.
this history of
myself:
this terrible way to
live.
but I feel I have now snatched
victory
from all the useless
raging black
hysteria.
I have now survived all
that and
they can club me with their
angry lives and
burn me on my
deathbed
but somehow
I have found a lasting
peace
they can never
take
away.
law
look, he told me,
all those little children dying in the trees,
and I said, what?
and he said, look,
and I went to the window
and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,
dead and dying,
and I said, what does it mean?
and he said, I don’t know but it’s been authorized.
the next day when I got up
they had dogs in the trees
dead and hanging and dying,
and I turned to my friend and said,
what does it mean?
and he said, don’t worry about it,
it’s the way of things, they took a vote,
it was decided,
and the next day it was cats,
I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast
and hung them in the trees
but they did,
and the next day it was horses and that wasn’t so good
because many branches broke,
and after bacon and eggs the next day
my friend pulled the pistol on me
over the coffee and said,
let’s go,
and we went outside
and there were all these men and women in the
trees, most of them dead or
dying, and he got the rope ready, and I said,
what does it mean? and he said, don’t worry,
it’s been authorized, it’s constitutional, it passed by
majority vote, and he tied my hands behind my back,
then opened the noose.
I don’t know who’s going to hang me, he said,
when I get done with you. I suppose, finally,
there’ll be just one of us left
and he’ll have to hang
himself.
suppose he doesn’t? I asked.
he has to, he said, it’s been authorized.
o, I said, well, let’s get on
with it
then.
a great writer
a great writer remains in bed
shades down
doesn’t want to see anyone
doesn’t want to write anymore
doesn’t want to try anymore;
the editors and publishers wonder:
some say he’s insane
some say he’s dead;
his wife now answers all the mail:
“…he does not w
ish to…”
and some others even walk up and down
outside his house,
look at the pulled-down
shades;
some even go up and ring the
bell.
nobody answers.
the great writer does not want to be
disturbed. perhaps the great writer is not
in? perhaps the great writer has gone
away?
but they all want to know the truth,
to hear his voice, to be told some good
reason for it all.
if he has a reason
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.
a gigantic thirst
I’ve been on antibodies for almost 6 months, baby, to cure a case of
TB, man, leave it to an old guy like me to catch such an old-fashioned
disease, catch it big as a basketball or like a boa constrictor
swallowing a gibbon; so now I’m on antibodies and been told not to
drink
or smoke for 6 months, and talk about biting iron with your
teeth, I’ve been drinking and smoking heavily and steadily with the
best
and the worst of them for over 50 years, yeah,
and the most difficult part, pard, I know too many people who
drink and smoke and they just go right on drinking and smoking in
front of me like
I’m not aching to crack their skulls and roll them on the floor
or just chase them the hell away out of my sight—a sight which
longs very much for anything even microscopically addictive.
the next hardest part is sitting at the typewriter without it,
I mean, that’s been my show, my dance, my entertainment, my
raison d’être, yep, mixing smoke and booze with the typer and you’ve
got a parlay there where the luck rains down night and day and in
between, and
you hear the phrase “cutting it cold turkey” but I don’t think that’s
strong enough, it should be “chopping it cold turkey” or “burying the
turkey
warm,” anyhow it hasn’t been easy, no no no no no no no no no no,
and when I look at a bottle of beer
it looks like bottled sunlight, a smoke is like the breath of life
and a bottle of red wine looks like the blood of life itself.
for me, it’s hard to think or worry about the future: the immediate
present seems too overwhelming and now I sympathize with all those
who fail
to curb their drinking and their smoking
because these last 6 months have been the longest 6 months of my life!
forgive me for boring you with all this but isn’t that why you’re
here?
eulogies
after death
we exaggerate a person’s good qualities,
inflate them.
during life
we are often repulsed by that same person
while talking to them on the telephone
or just being with them in the same room.
and we are often critical of the way they
walk, talk, dress
live
believe
but let them die
then what creatures they
become.
if only at a funeral service
somebody would say,
“what an odious individual
that one was!”
even at my funeral
let there be a bit of truth,
then the good clean
dirt.
a residue
stuck in mid-flight,
wickedly sheared,
dreaming of the
dactylozoid.
turned away,
fashioned to stop
on zero,
flamed out,
hacked at,
demobilized.
where is common
laughter?
simple joy?
where did they
go?
trick,
that.
even the skies
snarl.
what rancor,
what
bitterness…
the cry of the
smothered
heart,
now
remembering
better
times
wild and
wondrous.
now the sad
grim
present
cleaves.
1990 special
year-worn
weary to the bone,
dancing in the dark with the
dark,
the Suicide Kid gone
gray.
ah, the swift summers
over and gone
forever!
is that death
stalking me
now?
no, it’s only my cat,
this
time.
passage
and their ships burned, galleon and galley sail,
and they drowned as the clouds came down
like kings from thrones and held them:
servants, slaves, lions, sages, fools, merchants,
murderers; then the kelp, bitumen, alabaster, seashells
held court, and then came the shadows,
dark as walls under a dying sun: and bellicose and
vicious the sea pounded the sinking ships and the
weeds cradled the skulls in disquisition, the
sea kelp held the skulls up and you saw
them then, so odd and free and casual: all the
lonely lovers dead.
a most dark night in April
each man finally trapped and broken
each grave ready
each hawk killed
and love and luck too.
the poems have ended
the throat is dry.
I suppose there’s no funeral for this
and no tears
and no reason.
pain’s the master
pain is silent.
the throats of my poems
are dry.
sun coming down
no one is sorry I am leaving,
not even I;
but there should be a minstrel
or at least a glass of wine.
it bothers the young most, I think:
an unviolent slow
death.
still it makes any man dream;
you wish for an old sailing ship,
the white salt-crusted sail
and the sea shaking out hints of immortality.
sea in the nose
sea in the hair
sea in the marrow, in the eyes
and yes, there in the chest.
will we miss
the love of a woman or music or food
or the gambol of the great mad muscled
horse, kicking clods and destinies
high and away
in just one moment of the sun coming down?
but now it’s my turn
and there’s no majesty in it
because there was no majesty
before it
and each of us, like worms bitten
out of apples,
deserves no reprieve.
death enters my mouth
and snakes along my teeth
and I wonder if I am frightened of
this voiceless, unsorrowful dying that is
like the drying of a rose?
About the Author
CHARLES BUKOWSKI is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twentyfour, and began writing poetry when he was thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three.
During his lifetime he published over forty-five books of poetry and prose—many translated into more than a dozen languages. His worldwide popularity remains undiminished, and Ecco is proud to publish the five posthumous collections of his work (this volume is the fifth and final) in addition to a new selection of his later works, The Pleasures of the Damned.
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also by CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
Post Office (1971)