The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

by Charles Bukowski

  the latest sleeping on my pillow catches

  window lamplight through the mist of alcohol.

  I was the whelp, the prude who shook when

  the wind shook blades of grass the eye could see

  and

  you were a

  convent girl watching the nuns shake loose

  the Las Cruces sand from God’s robes

  you are

  yesterday’s

  bouquet so sadly

  raided, I kiss your poor

  breasts as my hands reach for love

  in this cheap Hollywood apartment smelling of

  bread and gas and misery.

  we move through remembered routes

  the same old steps smooth with hundreds of

  feet, 50 loves, 20 years.

  and we are granted a very small summer, and

  then it’s

  winter again

  and you are moving across the floor

  some heavy awkward thing

  and the toilet flushes, a dog barks

  a car door slams…

  it’s gotten inescapably away, everything,

  it seems, and I light a cigarette and

  await the oldest curse

  of all.

  Poem to a Most Affectionate Lady

  Please keep your icecream hands

  for the leopard,

  please keep your knees

  out of my nuts;

  if women must love me

  I ask them also

  to cook me sauerkraut dinners

  and leave me time

  for games of gold

  in the mind,

  and time for sleep

  or scratching

  or rolling upon my side

  like any tired bull

  in any tired meadow.

  love is not a candle

  burning down—

  life is,

  and love and life are

  not the same

  or else

  love having choice

  nobody would ever die.

  which means? which means:

  let loose a moment

  your hand upon my center—

  I’ve done you well

  like any scrabby plant

  upon a mountain, so

  please be kind enough

  to die for an hour

  or 2,

  or at least

  take time

  to turn the

  sauerkraut.

  Parts of an Opera, Parts of a Guitar, Part of Nowhere

  I don’t know, it was raining and I had fallen down

  somewhere but I seemed to have money so it didn’t

  matter, and I went into the opera to dry off, and it

  was opening night and everybody was dressed and

  trying

  to act very polite and educated but I saw a lot of

  guys there mean as hell, I don’t mean mean enough

  to be

  a Dillinger but mean enough to be successful in

  business and their wives were all tone deaf

  and even the people hollering in the opera

  were not enjoying it but hollering because it was the

  thing to do, like wearing bermudas in the summer, and

  I thought, I’ll never write an opera because they’ll

  walk all over it, and I walked out

  and phoned a gal I knew from South Philly and she met

  me on Olvera Street and we went into a fancy place

  and ate and drank and this big female kept

  whirling her fans and shaking her ass in my face

  and the South Philly broad got mad and I laughed

  and a little Mexican mean as a tarantula

  kept asking us to keep quiet and I asked him out

  in the alley and he went and I took him quite

  easily and I felt like Hemingway and I took the

  S. Philly broad to my room and I told her all about

  the opera

  how the people were so nicely dressed

  and applauded all the time

  whether it was good or bad

  and we slept real good that night

  the rain coming down on our heads

  through the open window

  but I kept thinking of the bigassed Mexican gal

  with the fans who kept shaking it

  and I don’t think she was kidding

  because I am real handsome

  and educated

  and someday I’m going to give up

  drinking and smoking and whoring

  and kneel and pray in the Sunday sunshine

  while they are killing the beautiful bulls

  and selling their ears and tails in

  Tiajuana, and I’m going to the opera,

  I’m going to the opera and have 12 guys

  working for me for

  80 dollars a week, including half-days on

  Saturdays and no

  hangovers on

  Monday.

  Letter from the North

  my friend writes of rejection and editors,

  and how he has visited K. or R. or W.,

  and am I in S.#12? he will have a poem in there,

  and T. has written him from Florida

  but rejected his poems; R. sleeps in the printshop

  and T. chided him mercilessly…

  met editor of the X. Review in the street,

  and editor acted like he was kicked in the nuts

  when he found out who he was

  and pressed him for opinion of poems;

  it does good to corner these guys sometime,

  flush them outa the brush;

  ad agencies have forgotten him, and W. is taking

  too long to read his book; only got $5

  for reading at the Unicorn,

  phoned K. of the W. Review, sounds like a sharp guy;

  and he thinks he is done with R.;

  encloses some clippings for my amusement:

  his name in a newspaper column;

  he’ll have to call R. again: S. is lecturing at

  the university

  and he can’t bear to go; M. is a homo,

  C. can’t make up his mind and P. is mad at him

  because he drank beer in front of N.

  nothing but rejects but he knows his stuff is good.

  L. was there to borrow a pack of Pall Malls, bastard makes

  him sick, always whining…

  B. writes that P. is in trouble, they must organize

  a benefit;

  awful discouraged. not even money for stamps.

  dead without stamps. write me, he says,

  I got the blues.

  write you? about what, my friend?

  I’m only interested in

  poetry.

  The Best Way to Get Famous Is to Run Away

  I found a loose cement slab outside the icecream store,

  tossed it aside and began to dig; the earth was

  soft and full of worms and soon I was in to my

  waist, size 36;

  a crowd gathered but stepped back before my shots

  of mud,

  and by the time the police came, I was in below

  my head,

  frightening gophers, eels and finding bits of golden

  inlaid skull,

  and they asked me, are you looking for oil, treasure,

  gold, the end of China? are you looking for love, God,

  a lost key chain? and little girls dripping icecream

  peered into my darkness, and a psychiatrist came

  and a

  college professor and a movie actress in a bikini, and

  a Russian spy and a French spy and an English spy,

  and a drama critic and a bill collector and an old

  girl friend, and they all asked me, what are you

  looking

  for? and soon it began to rain…atomic submarines

 
; changed course, Tuesday Weld hid behind a newspaper,

  Jean-Paul Sartre rolled in his sleep, and my hole

  filled

  with water; I came out black as Africa, shooting

  stars

  and epitaphs, my pockets full of lovely worms,

  and they took me to their jail and gave me a shower

  and a nice cell, rent-free, and even now the people

  are picketing in my cause, and I have signed

  contracts to appear on the stage and television,

  to write a guest column for the local paper and

  write a book and endorse some products, I have

  enough money to last me several years at the best

  hotels, but as soon as I get out of here, I’m gonna

  find me another loose slab and begin to dig, dig,

  dig, and this time I’m not coming back…rain, shine,

  or bikini, and the reporters keep asking, why did you

  do it? but I just light my cigarette and smile…

  The Kings Are Gone

  to say great words of kings and life

  to give equations like a math genius;

  I sat in on a play by Shakespeare,

  but the grandeur did not come through;

  I do not claim to have a good ear

  or a good soul, but most of Shakespeare

  laid me dry, I confess,

  and I went me into a bar

  where a man with hands like red crabs

  laid his sick life before me through the fumes,

  and I grew drunk,

  mirror upon myself,

  the age of life like a spider

  taking last blood from us all,

  and I knew I had misjudged Shakey,

  his voice speaking out of the tube of the grave,

  and the traffic went past

  I could see it out the door,

  pieces of things that moved

  and the red crab hands moved before my face

  and I took my drink then knocked it over

  with the back of my hand;

  and I walked out on the street

  but nothing got better.

  Reprieve and Admixture

  exposed to grief too long

  I become in time

  surfeited with suffering,

  decide that I owe myself

  survival; this is not easy:

  telling yourself that you

  deserve better days

  after the history of your past;

  but I have seen complete fools

  go on (of course)

  without ever

  considering their shortcomings;

  then too turtles crawl the

  land, dirty words scratched

  on their backs…

  but they hardly

  improve the horizon.

  The Swans Walk My Brain in April It Rains

  would you have me peel an orange and

  talk of Saavedra (Miguel de) Cervantes?

  get out! you are like that fly on the

  curtain.

  I am not liked in the marketplace.

  I do not smile at the children.

  I am not interested in the doings of

  armies.

  I drink at fountains until my eyes

  stick out like ripe berries.

  I stink under the armpits and do not

  shine my shoes.

  I do not own

  anything.

  I understand little but my

  misuse.

  I understand only horror and

  more horror.

  I cannot rhyme.

  I am too tired to

  steal.

  I listen to Segovia

  smile.

  I look at a hog’s head and

  am in

  love.

  I walk I walk a

  hymenotomy of a

  man—o

  sweet things of this time

  where are you?

  you must find me now for I am

  terrified with what I

  see!

  the dungeons sweep past lit with

  eyes. eyes? magma!

  I enter a shop and buy wine from a

  dead man

  then walk away under a sky overflowing

  with pus. the hunters cough

  on the benches.

  I walk…

  The End

  here they come

  grey and beastly

  rubbing out the night

  with their bloodred torches,

  Numbo! they scream,

  Hail Numbo!

  and grocer John gets down

  on the floor and hugs

  his precious eggs

  and sausage,

  and the bats of

  Babe Ruth get up and

  strut their

  averages

  around a dark bar,

  and the grey blonde in bed

  with me asks

  “what’s all the noise?”

  and I say,

  “the world is coming

  to an end.”

  and we sit in the window

  and watch, strangely

  happy. we have 14 cigarettes

  and a bottle of wine.

  enough to last

  until they

  find us.

  A Farewell Thing While Breathing

  a farewell thing while breathing

  was walking down the hall

  in underwear

  with painted face like clown

  a bomb from Cologne in right pocket

  a Season in Hell

  in the left,

  stripes of sunset

  like

  bass

  running

  down

  his

  arms,

  and they found him in the morning

  dangling in the fire escape

  window,

  face frosted and gone as an electric bulb,

  and the sparrows

  were in the brush downstairs,

  and

  friend,

  sparrows do not sing

  and they

  (the people, not the sparrows)

  carried him down the steps

  like a wasted owl.

  Sad-Eyed Mules of Men

  daily the

  sledgehammers and the

  sad-eyed mules of men, &

  there was Christ hung like

  dried bacon, and now

  the con-men raking it in:

  the young girls

  the mansions

  the trips to

  Paris, and look:

  even the great artists

  the great writers

  raking it in.

  but where do we go

  while the great writers are

  saving their own

  souls?

  where do we go?

  …to hell, of course, juggling their

  collected works

  under our

  collective

  arms.

  Dear Friend

  this

  is what happens when the

  drink and the life

  catch up with what is left of

  one.

  I still hope to send you the

  paperback although it is all

  swollen.

  I read

  most of it in the bathroom where the

  faucets drip hot water and make

  steam

  and that is what happened to the pages and

  the binding is about to

  pop

  but I still thought I’d mail it to

  you but

  something always interferes—

  there is a mirror

  here and

  I see myself in the mirror

  and I stagger like a deer taking a

  slug in the neck

  the face is not what it should

 
be and I tell myself that it does not

  matter

  that I

  am tired of factual and recognized

  good

  that we need new goodness new

  truth for

  ourselves and

  let the others wear that

  out.

  but anyhow

  I still hope to mail you the

  paperback

  I am sure I will mail it to you

  sometime I think I will

  just walk into the room and brush by

  knock it to the floor with my

  hand and pick it up

  without looking at anything

  and I will find an envelope and

  mail it to

  you.

  I want to get it out

  of here.

  A Conversation on Morality, Eternity and Copulation

  all up and down the street they came back

  without arms or legs or eyes or

  lungs or minds or

  lives, although

  the war had been

  won

  and the madam stood in the doorway

  and told me,

  it won’t matter, it’ll be

  business as

  usual

  because if they haven’t shot off

  the other parts

  they’ll still want to

  fuck.

  and the dead? I

  asked.

  the dead are without money or

  sense.

  many of the living are the same

  way? I suggested.

  yeah, but those we don’t

  serve.

  God will love

  you.

  I’m sure He

  will.

  will you serve

  Him?

  I have been serving Him, you know

  that: men are men and

  soldiers are soldiers and

  they love to