from his
cigar
I’ll be glad when it’s all
over
the noise is
terrible and I’m afraid to go and
buy a
paper.
The Gypsies Near Del Mar
they live down by the sea…these men
and you see them going to the gray public bath
like colonels on parade;
they have trailers and dogs and wives and children
in that importance; they crawl upon the rocks
as turtles do and dream sun-dreams
turtle-dreams
that do not hurt;
—or you see them singly…standing with their poles
the sea climbing their ankles and ignored like some
useless oil
and their long lines search and wait beyond the breakers,
a vein from life to life and calm brisk death.
I have never seen their fish, or their gods
or the color of their eyes—though I imagine
the palest shade of pink,
like small-sweet pickled onions, and their bellies
like the bellies of jellyfish hiding in flowers
beneath the rock.
they are there all year, I’m told…these same men
with their rusty lives. when it rains the sand gets wet,
not as bad as mud, and they never die: you see
their fires at night as you drive back from the track,
nothing moving except the flame a little and the sea
changing shape, and you can see the threads of smoke
easing into the sky;
and as their camp goes by, leaving you vacant
you stare again into a world of red tail lights
and turn on the radio
and through the glass like the hand of some
forgotten god
you watch
a gull dip over your car
and then rise and fly out toward the sea.
6 A.M.
naked
unarmored
before the open window
sitting at the table
drinking tomato juice
the publicly unpardonable part
of my body
below the table
I watch
a man in an orange robe
and bedroom slippers
shit his dog upon the lawn
both of them
tempered by sparrows.
we are losers; even at high noon
or late evening
none of us dresses well
in this neighborhood
none of us studies the grace of high
finance
successfully enough
to shake
ugly things away
(like needing the rent or
drinking 59 cent wine).
yet now
the wind comes through the window
cool,
as pure as a cobra;
it is a sensible time
undivided
either by
explanation
deepeyed cats
life insurance or
Danish kings.
I finish the
tomato
juice and
go to
bed.
A Trick to Dull Our Bleeding
practically speaking
the great words of great men
are not so great.
nor do great nations nor great beauties
leave anything but the residue
of reputation to be slowly
gnawed away.
nor do great wars seem so great,
nor great poems
nor first-hand legends.
even the sad deaths
are not now so sad,
and failure was nothing but a
trick
to keep us going,
and fame and love
a trick to dull our bleeding.
and as fire becomes ash and steel
becomes rust, we become
wise
and then
not so wise.
and we sit in chairs
reading old maps,
wars done, loves done, lives done,
and a child plays before us like a monkey
and we tap our pipe and yawn,
close our eyes and sleep.
pretty words
like pretty ladies,
wrinkle up and die.
Rose, Rose
rose, rose
bark for me
all these centuries in the sun
you have heard men sing
to break like the stems that held you
you have sat in the hair of young girls
like roses themselves, feeling like roses,
and you know, you know what happened
I gave roses to a lady once and she put them
on her dresser and hugged them and smelled them
and now the lady is gone and the roses are gone
but the dresser is there, I see the dresser
and on the boulevards I see you again
alive again! yes!
and, I am still
alive.
rose, rose
bark for me
walking last night
feeling my flesh fat about my girth
old dreams faint as fireflies
I came upon a flower
and like a giant god gone mad
yanked off its head
and then put the petals in my pocket
feeling and tearing
soft insides, ha so!—
like defiling a virgin.
she hugged you, she loved you
and she died, and
in my room, hand out of pocket,
the first night’s drink, and
along the edge of the glass,
the same same scarlet
virgin and thorn, my hand
my hand my hand; bark, rose
teeth of centuries blooming
in the sun, vast god damned
god pulling these poems out
of my head.
Spain Sits Like a Hidden Flower in My Coffeepot
it is like tanks come through Hungary and
I am looking for matchsticks to
build a soul
it is the hunger of the intestine
and feeling sorry for a
radio dropped and broken last Tuesday night
Gertrude knows what is left of me
but she can hardly boil an egg and
she can’t boil me
or put me together like
matchsticks
but some day I must send you
some of her poems or
her old shoe once worn by a
duchess
there isn’t anybody on the street now
the street is empty and
Spain sits like a hidden flower
in my coffeepot as
the audience applauds the bones of
Vivaldi
and I could go on
tossing phrases like
burning candles
but I leave that to the
acrobats
a loaf of bread
dog bark
babycry
the matchless failure of
bright things
her leaning forward
over a cup of tea
telling me—
you are a kind man
you are a very kind
man
the eyes believing dynasties of softness
the hands touching my neck
the cars going by
the snails sleeping with pictures of Christ
I phrase the ending like hatchets
or a bush burned down
and kiss a staring
greenblue
eye
g
reenblue eye
like faded drapes the light burned through
and my god
another woman another night
going on
the rats are thimbles in cats’ paws when it
rains in Miami
and the fence falls down
the world is on its back
legs lifted
and I enter again
into the
sweat and stink and torture—
a very kind man
gentle as a knife
the brilliant hush of parrots
Gertrude lives in a place by the freeway
and I live here—
the mice the garbage the lack of air
the gallantry
and
outside of here:
young girls skipping rope
strong enough to hang the men
now nowhere
about
me?:
I dreamed I drank an Arrow shirt
and stole a broken
pail.
Thermometer
As my skin wrinkles in warning like
paint on a burning wall
fruitflies with sterile
orange-grey
eyes
stare at me
while I dream of lavender ladies as impossible
and beautiful as
immortality
as my skin wrinkles in warning
I read The New York Times
while spiders wrestle with ants in shaded roots
of grass
and whores lift their hands to heaven for
love
while the white mice
huddle in controversy over a
piece of cheese
as my skin wrinkles in warning
I think of Carthage and Rome and
Berlin
I think of young girls crossing their
nylon legs at bus stops
as my skin wrinkles in warning like
paint on a burning wall
I get up from my chair to drink water
on a pleasant afternoon
and I wonder about water
I wonder about me,
a warm thermometer kind of wonderment
that rises like a butterfly
in a distilled pale yellow afternoon
and then I walk back out
and sit on my chair
and don’t think anymore—
as to the strain of broken ladders and old war
movies—
I let everything
burn.
Eaten by Butterflies
maybe I’ll win the Irish Sweepstakes
maybe I’ll go nuts
maybe
maybe unemployment insurance or
a rich lesbian at the top of a hill
maybe re-incarnation as a frog…
or $70,000 found floating in a plastic sack
in the bathtub
I need help
I am a fat man being eaten by
green trees
butterflies and
you
turn turn
light the lamp
my teeth ache the teeth of my soul ache
I can’t sleep I
pray for the dead streetcars
the white mice
engines on fire
blood on a green gown in an operating room in
San Francisco
and I am caught
ow ow
wild: my body being there filled with nothing but
me
me caught halfway between suicide and
old age
hustling in factories next to the
young boys
keeping pace
burning my blood like gasoline and
making the foreman
grin
my poems are only scratchings
on the floor of a
cage.
Destroying Beauty
a rose
red sunlight;
I take it apart
in the garage
like a puzzle:
the petals are as greasy
as old bacon
and fall
like the maidens of the world
backs to floor
and I look up
at the old calendar
hung from a nail
and touch
my wrinkled face
and smile
because
the secret
is beyond me.
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 and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, 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 twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).
During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), and Hollywood (1989). Among his most recent books are the posthumous editions of What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999), Open All Night: New Poems (2000), Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967 (2001), and The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems (2001).
All of his books have now been published in translation in over a dozen languages and his worldwide popularity remains undiminished. In the years to come, Ecco will publish additional volumes of previously uncollected poetry and letters.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
Post Office (1971)
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972)
South of No North (1973)
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955—1973 (1974)
Factotum (1975)
Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974—1977 (1977)
Women (1978)
Play the Piano Drunk /Like a Percussion Instrument/ Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)
Shakespeare Never Did This (1979)
Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)
Ham on Rye (1982)
Bring Me Your Love (1983)
Hot Water Music (1983)
There’s No Business (1984)
War All the Time: Poems 1981—1984 (1984)
You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986)
The Movie: “Barfly” (1987)
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946—1966 (1988)
Hollywood (1989)
Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems (1990)
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960—1970 (1993)
Pulp (1994)
Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s—1970s (Volume 2) (1995)
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories (1996)
Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems (1997)
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (1998)
Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978—1994 (Volume 3) (1999)
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire: New Poems (1999)
Open All Night: New Poems (2000)
The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems (2001)
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski & Sheri Martinelli 1960—1967 (2001)
Copyright
THE ROOMINGHOUSE MADRIGALS: EARLY SELECTED POEMS 1946-1966. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1988 by Charles
Bukowski. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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The Roominghouse Madrigals Page 15
