Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

by Charles Bukowski

  and cap; b.f.3., Indian Red—Impetuous, by Top Row,

  and people kept walking into me

  although there was no place to go,

  they were putting them in the gate

  and the people were walking like ants over spilled

  sugar,

  the machine had cranked them up to die

  and they were blind with it,

  and now by the 7th race

  stinking sweating broke ugly

  reamed

  there was no way back to the dream,

  and the horses came out of the gate

  and I looked for my colors—

  I saw them, and the boy seemed to be riding sideways

  he had the horse running in and was pulling his head back

  toward the outer rail,

  and I could tell by the way the horse was striding

  that he was out of it;

  the action had been all wrong

  and I walked to the bar

  while the winners turned into the stretch,

  and they were making the final calls as I ordered my drink,

  and I leaned there thinking

  I once knew places that sweetly cried

  their walls’ voices

  where mirrors showed me chance,

  I was once saddened when an evening became

  finally a night to sleep away.

  —the bartender said, I hear they are going to send in

  the 7 horse in the next one.

  I once sang operas and burned candles

  in a place made holy by nothing but myself

  and whatever there was.

  —I never bet mares in the summer,

  I told him.

  then the crowd came on in

  complaining

  explaining

  bragging

  thinking of suicide or drunkenness or sex,

  and I looked around

  like a man waking up in jail

  and whatever there was

  became that,

  and I finished my drink

  and walked away.

  on going out to get the mail

  the droll noon

  where squadrons of worms creep up like

  stripteasers

  to be raped by blackbirds.

  I go outside

  and all up and down the street

  the green armies shoot color

  like an everlasting 4th of July,

  and I too seem to swell inside,

  a kind of unknown bursting, a

  feeling, perhaps, that there isn’t any

  enemy

  anywhere.

  and I reach down into the box

  and there is

  nothing—not even a

  letter from the gas co. saying they will

  shut it off

  again.

  not even a short note from my x-wife

  bragging about her present

  happiness.

  my hand searches the mailbox in a kind of

  disbelief long after the mind has

  given up.

  there’s not even a dead fly

  down in there.

  I am a fool, I think, I should have known it

  works like this.

  I go inside as all the flowers leap to

  please me.

  anything? the woman

  asks.

  nothing, I answer, what’s for

  breakfast?

  i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody’s wife

  30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox

  and look here, they write,

  you are a dupe for the state, the church,

  you are in the ego-dream,

  read your history, study the monetary system,

  note that the racial war is 23,000 years old.

  well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor,

  his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and

  there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment

  in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow

  a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest,

  the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up,

  a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible,

  well-read, starving, depressed, but actually

  a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor,

  but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew

  and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes

  and watching the backs of houses come down in flames,

  but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough,

  large or small enough,

  or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy

  fell through,

  and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed

  with his

  wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have

  his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and

  I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom;

  but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans,

  and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars

  and then I went inside to the bars,

  and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew,

  how all he did was sew on buttons and talk,

  and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us—

  he gave way because his bladder would not go on,

  and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan

  and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the

  Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice,

  she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope,

  and she had a very nice figure, very good legs,

  but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government

  but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as

  their ideas

  and that ideas were governments turned into men;

  and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini

  and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution,

  nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind,

  rattled like sabres, cracked like cannon,

  and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox

  across the fields under the sun,

  and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly

  and knew that soon very soon I would have to get

  very drunk again.

  the girls

  I have been looking at

  the same

  lampshade

  for

  5 years

  and it has gathered

  a bachelor’s dust

  and

  the girls who enter here

  are too

  busy

  to clean it

  but I don’t mind

  I have been too

  busy

  to notice

  until now

  that the light

  shines

  badly

  through

  5 years’

  worth.

  a note on rejection slips

  it is not very good

  to not get through

  whether it’s the

  wall

  the human mind

  sleep

  wakefulness

  sex

  excretion

  or most anything

  you can name

  or

  can’t name.

  when a chicken

  catches its worm

  the chicken gets through

  and when the worm

  catches you

  (dead or alive)

  I’d have to say,

  even thro
ugh its lack

  of sensibility,

  that it enjoys

  it.

  it’s like when you

  send this poem

  back

  I’ll figure

  it just didn’t get

  through.

  either there were

  fatter worms

  or the chicken

  couldn’t

  see.

  the next time

  I break an egg

  I’ll think of

  you.

  scramble with

  fork

  and then turn up

  the flame

  if I

  have

  one.

  true story

  they found him walking along the freeway

  all red in

  front

  he had taken a rusty tin can

  and cut off his sexual

  machinery

  as if to say—

  see what you’ve done to

  me? you might as well have the

  rest.

  and he put part of him

  in one pocket and

  part of him in

  another

  and that’s how they found him,

  walking

  along.

  they gave him over to the

  doctors

  who tried to sew the parts

  back

  on

  but the parts were

  quite contented

  they way they

  were.

  I think sometimes of all the good

  ass

  turned over to the

  monsters of the

  world.

  maybe it was his protest against

  this or

  his protest

  against

  everything.

  a one man

  Freedom March

  that never squeezed in

  between

  the concert reviews and the

  baseball

  scores.

  God, or somebody,

  bless

  him.

  x-pug

  he hooked to the body hard

  took it well

  and loved to fight

  had seven in a row and a small fleck

  over one eye,

  and then he met a kid from Camden

  with arms thin as wires—

  it was a good one,

  the safe lions roared and threw money;

  they were both up and down many times,

  but he lost that one

  and he lost the rematch

  in which neither of them fought at all,

  hanging on to each other like lovers through the boos,

  and now he’s over at Mike’s

  changing tires and oil and batteries,

  the fleck over the eye

  still young,

  but you don’t ask him,

  you don’t ask him anything

  except maybe

  you think it’s going to rain?

  or

  you think the sun’s gonna come out?

  to which he’ll usually answer

  hell no,

  but you’ll have your important tank of gas

  and drive off.

  class

  these boys have got class

  they ought to make kings

  out of old men

  rolling cigarettes

  in rooms small enough

  to recognize

  a single shadow;

  for them

  all has gone away

  like a light under the

  door

  yet

  they recognize and

  bear the absence;

  tricked and slugged to

  zero

  they wait on death

  with the temperate patience of

  a mother teaching her child

  to eat;

  for them, everything has

  run away

  like a rose in the mouth

  of a hog;

  the burning of cities

  must have been

  like this.

  but like trucks of garbage

  shaking with love

  these boys

  might

  rise like Lorca

  out of the road

  with one more poem,

  rise like

  Lazarus to

  gaze upon the

  still living female,

  and then

  get drunk

  drunk

  until it all

  falls apart

  so sad

  again.

  living

  I mean, I just slept

  I awoke with a fly on my elbow and

  I named the fly Benny

  then I killed him

  and then I got up and looked in the

  mailbox

  and there was some kind of warning from the

  government

  but since there wasn’t anybody standing in the bushes with

  a bayonet

  I tore it up

  and went back to bed and looked up at the ceiling

  and I thought, I really like this,

  I’m just going to lie here for another ten

  minutes

  and I lay there for another ten minutes

  and I thought,

  it doesn’t make sense, I’ve got so many things to

  do but I’m going to lie here another

  half hour,

  and I stretched

  stretched

  and I watched the sun through the small leaves of a tree

  outside, and I didn’t have any wonderful thoughts,

  I didn’t have any immortal thoughts,

  and that was the best part

  and it got a little hot

  and I threw the blankets off and slept—

  but a damned dream:

  I was on the train again

  on that same 5 hour round-trip to the track,

  sitting by the window,

  past the same sad ocean, China out there mouthing

  peculiarities in the back of my

  brain, and then somebody sat next to me

  and talked about horses

  mothballs of talk that ripped me apart like

  death, and then I was there

  again: the horses running like something shown on a

  screen and the jockeys very white in the face

  and it didn’t matter who finally

  won and everybody knew

  it, the ride back in the dream was the same as the ride

  back in reality:

  black tons of night around

  the same mountains ashamed of being

  there, the sea again, again,

  the train heading like a cock through a needle’s

  eye

  and I had to get up and go to the urinal

  and I hated to get up and go to the urinal

  because somebody had thrown paper, some loser had thrown paper

  into the toilet again and it wouldn’t

  flush, and when I came back out

  everybody had nothing to do but look at my

  face

  and I am so tired

  that they know when they see my face

  that I hate

  them

  and then they hate me

  and want to

  kill me

  but don’t.

  I woke up but since there wasn’t anybody

  over my bed

  to tell me I was doing

  wrong

  I slept some

  more.

  when I woke up this time

  it was almost

  evening. people were coming in from work.

  I got up and sat in a chair and watched them

  coming in. they didn’t look so good.

  even the young girls didn
’t look so good as when they

  left.

  and the men came in: hatchet men, killers, thieves, con-men,

  the whole bunch, and their faces were more horrible than any

  halloween masks ever devised.

  I found a blue spider in the corner and killed him with a

  broom.

  I looked at the people a while more and then I got tired and

  stopped looking and fried myself a couple of eggs and sat down

  and had some tea and bread with it.

  I felt fine.

  then I took a bath and went back to

  bed.

  the intellectual

  she writes

  continually

  like a long nozzle

  spraying

  the air,

  and she argues

  continually;

  there is nothing

  I can say

  that is really not’

  something else,

  so,

  I stop saying;

  and finally

  she argues herself

  out the door

  saying

  something like—

  I’m not trying to

  impress myself

  upon you.

  but I know

  she will be

  back, they always

  come back.

  and

  at 5 p.m.

  she was knocking at the door.

  I let her in.

  I won’t stay long, she said,

  if you don’t want me.

  it’s all right, I said,

  I’ve got to take a

  bath.

  she walked into the kitchen and

  began on the

  dishes.