Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

by Charles Bukowski

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.