Beerspit Night and Cursing (41 page)

Go…Buk…go…turn the moon slowly in your hands…like a slightly tarnished platter—and tell me what it was like. Only
H.D
. knew. If you can write “out of essence” & dissociate between essence & instrument then it’s stale to write about whores & pussy—

Cant you
SEE
—you
ARE
the Life of this Place??? “Spot the rot” is good—but Buk—you are a
BIG
boy now—don’t drag your private life to the page—just you from your mountain top—tell us from there—you are taking Corrington like a ghost in a tree & ripping him like a wild tusk’d creature.

O Savage One—write these things—then
RE
write them—extracting all the private life—employ your pithy salty phrases / perceptions / insights—but mellow my Raw Whiskey—then slide into our heads like the burning bitter liquid life you
ARE
/

I
had to ‘grow
UP
’—to turn & rend that green ego—centric, really
AWFUL
monster from Greenwich Village—I had to stop cussin’ and Miss Kickin’
IT
—egotism leads to that death of no life/ O
YOU
stir’d me out of the dust
with yr savage boar tusk rending of the now mellow Corrington—send me mas mas more more

Los Angeles, Calif. April 9, 1966

Sheri, Sheeri, Sheeeeeriii—

going through your letter, rec. this morning. regarding “I can lie to a hot blonde”—this was showmanship, clowning, to keep the audience awake. a trick but perhaps not a very good one. but speaking of lying to women, I had a piece of paper around here that I had written something on—lost it now—but it said: “the average woman loves the lie so much that she usually marries it.” this is why I have preferred my certain type of whore—no fuss, no muss. I have only met and lived with one
woman that I could get straight through to personally—who could hear my voice and I could hear hers. she had to die, of course. may the angels, if they are there, bless her eternally.

Leslie Wolf Hedly
said “we all write badly at times.” Liesly Wolf was more famous then than he is now but I fear his bad writing was more than “at times”.

I
did
read H.D. you sent me a book of hers when she was dying (in Switzerland?) and asked me to write her a card. I did. I made the card as kind as possible without telling any lies.

Joyce: “sad as a seagull is when flying all alone.” do you really think these lone seagulls are sad? I think that we are thinking too quickly here, picking up the first thread. I always feel that these lone gulls are
mad
, that they have popped their cork. especially at that time when the last of the sun is going into night. it’s like they’ve spun off the wheel and when they come down over me, these lone ones, their eyes are almost torn from their heads in the agony of mad hate that seems much more than the lost hunger of sadness, and they would rip my eyes to replace theirs, they would do horrible deeds upon me there on the beach, if their devil were larger, if I were drunk, asleep, dying…

yes, most men can endure poverty; that’s why they like to pretend it’s brave. I have been poor most of my life because it is more comfortable—I mean that it has allowed me to do some of the things I wanted to and stopped me from doing the things I didn’t want to do—like factories.

I don’t know about “the mountaintop”. you can’t go there until you are ready and my time may not come. I know what you mean by “mountaintop”. I know that it is there but I’ve got to work through slag, white hot slag first. the tool is good if we are true to it. but I cannot move on until I am done where I am and it may well be that my time will be finished far before I am ready. many consider that where I am now is lower than where anybody is. they think that I delight in muck, expose, talking out of class. I am only trying to find out where I am wherever that may be. and then muck is never muck, it is only called
muck. that the moon is clean enough to behold does not mean that a whore is not a moon.

rather flattened today. wrote poetry last night from 10 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. then couldn’t sleep. haven’t slept yet. don’t want to. must get poems typed up. Christ, come to think of it, I wrote poems from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. also. I must be going mad. I have submissions out to 17 magazines at once.

wrote a review of
Layton for some Canadian mag—
Evidence
. I told them that Layton was pretty damned good. so don’t think I go around ripping and tearing because I figure ripping and tearing is easy and glorious. ah, you
know
this!

the doctor still twaddling and torturing me. but it will soon end. either that or I will break both of his arms. I tell him, “Now you get up on that table and let me work you over.” “but I am not sick,” he tells me. “that’s not the
idea
,” I tell him. “he
isss
a very
strange
man,” I hear him tell the nurse as I leave. and I am thinking about them: 2 puppets on a stage, glass hunks of shit.

o, I am burned out my lovely flexible warm angel, Sheri, invisible love, listen here are parts of a long poem I wrote & you see I am still far from the mountaintop—(but don’t show these lousy excerpts to any writers. some dogs have been stealing my lines…out of letters sent, out of poems submitted…)—

oh, hell no, I won’t bore you (I trust you, that’s not it. it’s tempo, tempo & stretch & [
illegible
]. all that’s important, even in letters or anywhere. sure) with my seriousness! here’s a short one:

And the Moon
and the Stars and the World
:

my oil paintings that I did with the palms of my hands with unmixed tubes on plain large paper are about dry now. I guess they are not exceptional but it is a spread of color and I spread the color so it would not tire
me
, and since very few people come to this place, that is the best way, and still would be—the other way around.

love to you, good one,

Buk

THE LAND OF PEACE IS HERE NOW—ALL WE NEED IS A LITTLE LUCK, BETTER DIRECTIVES, MILDER WINE
…

los angles, calif.
April eleven, 19six6

sHeRi::::

10th. hour. struck down by waiting. little things in this little cave.
woman
angry at me but that doesn’t matter because long ago all broken off there—physically, spiritually; but like to visit my little girl without all her snarling. her group, her gang, has now completely lassooed her mind. I am a loner and will not show at their leftwing poetry readings and chatterings and world-saving talk. I gotta save myself. wrote a foreword to a book of poems by a young poet, Steve Richmond.
Hitler Painted Roses
. phone just rang. talk. where was I? let’s just say that her hand-holders didn’t like the foreword. I asked Richmond to send you his book. maybe you’ve read it by now. anyhow, I am playing with the girl and I can
feel
her (the woman)
bristling
, I can feel the fangs of her ugly 1/8th. soul in the air.

“Richmond’s always writing about reaching up into his ass for shit,” she snarled.

“Which poem was that?”

“all his poems. in all his poems he is talking about reaching up into his ass.”

“ah, yes, dirty poems,” I said.

I can’t haggle with them, Sheri. I don’t argue in the marketplace. I learn from them. generally by
reversing
their feelings and opinions, I get the truth. people are valuable to me in this way. if they all run up one road, I know that the other road is right. why is this? what games do the gods play?

there is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day.

I can feel this woman slipping away, drowning, melting, dissolving into hate, into little cubicles of shoddy, 2 bit, obvious ideas. I believe she senses it too, can feel the damnation coming down, the no-light. she is drowning in the crowd. that’s it—she is drowning in the crowd, and it seems so easy, it takes no resistance.

the last time she came over here she brought one of her boyfriends over with her, along with the little girl. introduced me. “this is John.” fine. John was wood, 55 years of wood, the eyes drilled-out. he sat, sat. “Mr. Bukowski, I was introduced to your poetry last week.” I didn’t say anything. was I responsible for the fact that he was introduced to my poetry? my responsibility was over after I finished the poem.

just had a visitor. 2 hours. jesus, forgot what I was saying.

this was the guy who gave me this typer, paper, envelopes…an admirer? I am going to have to tell him I need more time. no time for chitchat. shit. you can see how he broke me off. danger. there’s always this danger—people popping heads in. nice people, in a sense. but no soul. they can destroy. I’ve fought too long to be melted away by the handshakers. the clock is my love. going. I need words, rocks, things to carve with. bless the dead emperors. lousy letter. but will mail.

love,

Buk

12. April 66 pobx 1044 pacifica calif

Charles:

and I do
SEE
—to “keep audience awake” & that wd be legit / and you
DO
“keep” them “
AWAKE
”—

O Buk—“the
average
woman”—if I were a Bukowski & would put word to life describing what they have done to me—but my way is to turn away & never employ their name nor ever again see their face in my life—I shut them out—what crimes they commit—no wonder
E.P
. laughed when I modestly said I wanted to enlighten my sisters—the pus sacs full of 7 deadlys or the young unpaid whores full of the most vain egotism—let us forget the average woman—sing of the unusual females—society is
mean
to them—only the poet retains his balance when faced by the luminous eye of the she-male—or maybe you did well—“the hot blonde”—(this a.m. one is not feeling even—) cause it be a public fact that it’s o.k. to lie to
HER
—Only it is not “the hot blonde” who destroys our thread of life down here in The Shytte Factory but the female maggots who feed upon our garbage buckets like succulent maggots crawling through stale shells—chewing away at our old turds & keeping dead shit alive with their mouths and tongues. Give us a tombstone for that breed—

well—Hedly—but that line is full of sweet humble modesty—it touched me// o.k.

YOU
D I D N’T
read
H.D
.***!!!)(‘‘&_%$#+”$%_&’(**:*)($% you haven’t digested her—Christ—begin with
H.D
.—maybe your eye read her—but go to her as to a woman needing your love—read her as if she spoke in a living voice to
YOU
—Charles Bukowski—as if she were telling you her wistful secrets—E.P. failed her—it was his early scorpio sting-tail phase—scorpio sexiest sign of the zodiac—he cdn’t over-come that—he thought
SHE
failed
HIM
—

Don’t
TRY
to read her with yr soul’s eyes until you hit a day when you cannot go out…when no one knows where you are nor would you receive them if they did—when loneliness is like a serpent with many heads tearing away at yr middle brain in centre of body…when tears are bursting out of yr eye & inside yr body—when no phone is near & you cannot eat…and the windows are covered with steam & you cannot see out & what you see in aint worth looking at—& all yr ideals have turned into illusions…and each hero that blew in blew
OUT
—& there
is no one around for thousands of miles that you could even talk to—& when other room renters call you “th’ dutchess” behind yr back because they see agony as being “stuck up”—that’s the time to reach for
H.D
. and she puts beautiful fragrant musical silence throughout your cells & your beyond pain spirit lifts its dumb head up to gaze upon an enormous room where snails show us the way because they have a shell…built second by second—that is the “mountain top”—wait for such a day & then read
H.D
. “from hunger”—

I have found my mountain top—and I saw a pixie man that had his—He was walking up that street in San Francisco lined with hock shops—shorter than I—sort of roly—poly—pink face—with the merriest expression ever seen…I suspect he was not quite human—an element—and drunk as a lord—sort of floating above the ground—he was going up to The Living Dead—almost poking them in the breast bone—saying things to them—precisely pronouncing their fates to their dumb ears—he did that to me too—our eyes met—he was such
FUN
to see—he told me “oh
you
RRR
all
right”—my god but I am not—otherwise I would have snatched him & taken him into my life—what a fool I was…he had found his mountain top—one of the Immortals passed me by on Hock Shop Street & stupid lets him pass on!!!! O my loss bugs me right now.

Lor’ man but you right—’ bout Joyce & that line—I was hearing the sad lone tone—you more right—the bastids are only hungry—I guess Joyce ought to have put “sad as a sea gull seems” etc or word meaning signifying sadness rather than being sad/

O NO
no one I have talked with & it includes Ye Square—thinks
that
(“delight in muck” etc)—they think that you are honest…alive with life—“muck”—that is
how
you move them—They
need
the shock—The whores I knew in
NYC
were girls too intellent to subside into soup
BURP
Pia—yet cdn’t wander the wilderness trusting in the Hawly Ghost—and who don’t blame them iz me—They are
EP
’s “priestess astray in the streets”
or words to—