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.
save the pier
you shoulda been at this party,
I know you hate parties
but you seem to be at most of them.
anyhow, I took my girl, you know
her—
Java Jane?
yes, this party was at the merry-go-round
where they are trying to tear the pier down, you
know where that is?
yes, the red paint, the broken
windows—
yes, anyhow, my girl lives in a room just above the
merry-go-round. it’s a
birthday party for the woman who owns the
merrry-go-round.
she’s trying to save the pier
she’s trying to save the merry-go-round—
plenty of drinks for everybody, my girl lives in the
room right above the
merry-go-round.
sounds great.
I phoned. you weren’t
in.
it’s all right.
well, there was plenty to drink and they turned the
merry-go-round on, it was free, music and
everything.
sounds great.
my girlfriend and I got into an
argument, all the drinking—
of course.
I’m standing apart from her
she’s standing apart from me.
she’s got a glass of wine in her hand.
I give her a dark green deathly stare,
she’s stricken
she steps back
the thing is whirling
a horse’s hoof kicks her in the ass.
she drops down upon the spinning.
it all happens so fast—
but I do notice
that all the time she’s circling
to the music under those horses
she’s holding her glass upright
in order not to spill a
drop.
brave.
sure. only all the time her panties are
showing. glowing and glistening.
pink.
wonderful. how do they do it?
they conspire.
the glistening pink?
yes. so her panties are showing and I think
well, that’s all right but it probably looks
a hell of a lot better to them than it does to
me, so I moved a step forward and said,
Jane.
what happened?
she kept spinning around holding her drink up
showing her pink bottom…there seemed something
tenuous about it, deliciously inane…
stunted glory finally comes forth hollering…
exactly. she kept gliding around
legs outspread—
dizzied with life—
vengeful—
she must have cared for me to show her
panties to all those
people. anyhow, she kept sliding around
until her leg hit one of this guy’s legs—
he’d stepped forward for a closer look.
he was 67 years old and with his wife
and they were both
eating spaghetti off paper plates, anyhow,
my girl’s leg hit his
she came bouncing off on her ass
still holding the glass of wine upright.
I walked over and picked her up
and she still held it
level, then she lifted it and
drank it.
sounds like it was a
fine party.
I phoned. you weren’t
in.
spiderwebs of dripping
wet-dew sex like
badbreath dreams.
exactly. you should have been
there.
sorry.
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.
voices
1.
my moustache is pasted-on
and my wig and my eyebrows
and even my eyes…
then something stuns me…
the lampshades swing, I hear
simmering and magic and
incredible sounds.
2.
I know I went mad, almost as
an act of theory:
the lost are found
the sick are healthy
the non-creators are the
creators.
3.
even if I were a comfortable, domesticated
sophisticate I could never drink the
blood of the masses and
call it wine.
4.
why did I have to lift that pretty girl’s
car by the bumper because the jack got stuck?
I couldn’t straighten up
and they took me away like a pretzel and straightened
me but I still couldn’t move…
it was the hospital’s fault, the doctors’ fault.
then those two boys dropped me on the way to the
x-ray room…I hollered LAWSUIT!
but I guess it was that girl’s fault—
she shouldn’t have shown me all that leg
and haunch.
5.
listen, listen, SPACESHIT LOVE, TORN IN DRIP OUT,
SPACESHIT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE; KILL, LEARN TO USE A
WEAPON; OPEN AREAS, REALIZE, BE DIVINE, SPACESHIT
LOVE, IT’S approaching…
6.
I did a take-off of E.H. in my first novel,
been living green ever since. I’m probably
the best journalist America ever had, I can
bullshit on any subject, and that counts for
something. you admire me much more
than the first man you meet on the street
in the morning, basically, though, it’s a
fact, I’ve lived during an era of no writers
at all, so I’ve earned a position
because nothing else appeared. o.k.,
it’s a bad age. I suppose I am number
one. But it’s hardly the same as when we
had giants turning us on. forget it:
I’m living green.
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.
8.
my problem, like most, is artistic preciousness. I
exist, full of french fries and glory
and then I look around, see the Art-form, pop into
it and tell them how fine I am and what I think.
this is the same tiresomeness that has almost destroyed
art for centuries. I made a record once of
myself reading my poems to a lion at the zoo. he really
roared, as if he were in pain, all the poets play
this record and laugh when they get drunk.
9.
remember my novel about jail where
photos of heroes and lovers floated against the
rock walls?
I got famous. I came over here.
I got hot for the black motorcyclists of Valley
West and Bakersfield
who took my fame and jammed it
and made me suck their loneliness and dementia
and their dream of Cadillac white soul and
Cadillac black soul
and they creamed up my ass
and into my nostrils and into my ears
while I said, Communism, Communism
and they grinned and knew I didn’t mean it.
straight on through
I am
hung by a nail
the sun melts my heart
I am
cousin to the snake
and am afraid of waterfalls
I am
afraid of women and green walls
the police stop me and
tell me
while the trees whirl in the wind
(I am hungover) that my muffler is shot and
my windshield wiper doesn’t work
and the lens on my back-up light is broken.
I don’t have a back-up light,
sign the citation and am thankful,
inside,
that they don’t take me in for what I’m
thinking
sadness drips like water beads
in a half-poisoned well,
I know that my chances have narrowed down to
almost nothing—
I’m like a bug in the bathroom when you flick on the
lightswitch at 3 a.m.
love, finally, with a washrag stuffed down its
throat, pictures of joy
turned to paperclips, you
know you know you know.
once you understand this process (what you
must understand
is
that most things
just won’t work, so
you don’t try to save
them, and by the time you learn this
you’ve run out of
years)—once you understand this process
you need only get burned 2 or 3 more times
before they stuff you away, and
it’s good to know that—
stop being so fucking quick with your
rejoinders and relax—
you’re about finished, too, just
like I am. no shame
there. I can walk into any bar and
order a scotch and water,
pay,
and put my hand around the glass,
they don’t know, they won’t know,
either about you or about me,
they’ll talk about football and the
weather and the energy crisis,
and our hands will reach up
the mirror watching the hands
and we’ll drink it down—
Jane, Barbara, Frances, Linda, Liza, Stella,
father’s brown leather slipper
upsidedown in the bathroom,
nameless dead dogs,
tomorrow’s newspaper,
water boiling out of the radiator on a
Thursday afternoon, burning your arm
halfway to the elbow, and not even being
angry at the pain,
grinning for the winners
grinning for the guy who fucked your girl
while you were drunk or away
and grinning for the girl who let him.
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame Page 14
