Authors: Charles Bukowski
my system is always the same:
keep it loose
write a great number of
poems
try with all your
heart and
don’t worry about the
bad
ones.
keep it going
keep it
hot
forget about immortality
if you ever
remembered
it.
the sound of this machine is
good.
much paper
more desire.
just
hammer away and wait for lady
luck.
what a
bargain.
hunched over this white sheet of paper
at 4 in the afternoon. I
received a letter from a young poet this morning
informing me that I was one of the most
important writers of the last
200 years.
well, now, one can’t believe that
especially if one has felt as I have
this past month,
walking about,
thinking,
surely I am going crazy,
and then thinking,
I can’t write
anymore.
and then I remember the factories,
the production lines,
the warehouses,
the time clocks,
overtime and layoffs
and flirtations with the Mexican girls
on the assembly line;
each day everything was carefully planned,
there was always something to do,
there was more than enough to do,
and if you didn’t keep up,
if you weren’t clever and swift and
obedient
you were out with the sparrows and
the bums.
writing’s different, you’re floating out there in the
white air, you’re hanging from the high-wire,
you’re sitting up in a tree and they’re working at
the trunk with a power
saw …
there’s no silk scarf about one’s neck,
no English accent,
no remittance checks from aristocratic ladies in Europe
with blind and impotent
husbands.
it’s more like a fast hockey game
or putting on the gloves with a man
50 pounds heavier and ten years
younger, or
it’s like steering a ship through the fog
with a mad damsel clinging to your
neck
and all along you know you’ve gotten away
with some quite obvious stuff, that
you’ve been given undeserved credit, for stuff
that you either wrote offhand or
hardly meant or hardly cared
about.
well, it helps to be
lucky.
yet, on the other hand, you have sometimes
done it as you always knew it should
be done, and you knew then that it was
as good as it could be done,
and that maybe you
had
done it better,
in a way,
than anybody else had done it for a long time
and
you allowed yourself to feel
good about that
for a moment or
two.
they put the pressure on you
with statements about 200 years,
and when only one individual says it, that’s all
right
but when 2 or 3 or 4 say it—
that’s when they tend to open the door to a
kookoo bin.
they tell you to give up cigarettes and
booze, and then they tell you that you
have 25 more good years ahead of you and
then
perhaps ten more years to enjoy your old
age
as you suck on
the rewards and
memories.
Patchen’s gone, we need you, man,
we all need you for that
good feeling just above the
belly button—
knowing that you are there in some small room in
northern California writing poems and
killing flies with a torn
flyswatter.
they can kill you,
the praisers can kill you,
the young girls can kill you,
as the blue-eyed boys in English depts.
who send warm letters
handwritten
on lined paper
can kill you,
and they’re all correct:
2 packs a day and the bottle
can kill you
too.
of course,
anything can kill you
and something eventually
will. all I can say is that
today
I have just inserted a new
typewriter ribbon
into this old machine
and I am pleased with the way it
works and that makes for more than just an
ordinary day, thank
you.
there’s an old movie
based on a Hemingway short story
I saw the beginning of it
again on late night /
early morning tv
but the fellow who plays
Hem
his ears aren’t right
neither are
his chin
his hair
his voice;
and there’s this lovely
wench
in the film
with perfect buns
whose role it is to
endure his precious
literary abuse
while he slowly dies in the
African jungle.
I click the movie off.
of course, I never met
Hemingway.
maybe he was like that fellow.
I hope
not.
then I look about my bedroom and
think, Jesus Jesus,
why am I so upset by this
lousy tv movie?
what did I want them to make him
look like?
act like?
he was just a journalist from
Michigan who liked to shoot
big game
and his last kill was his
biggest;
surely he would have deserved the
nice buns
and the adoring eyes
of that actress who
he never saw and
who
in real life
later
drank herself to
death.
(the actor
who plays Hem
in the film is
still around
however
but barely
functioning.)
I guess when I look at that
movie
all I can think of to say
is:
bwana, bring me a
drink.
listen, I been in the navy and I never heard cussing like you and
your girlfriend, man, and it lasts all night, every night.
we got religious people here, children, decent working folk, you’re
keeping them awake every night and look at this place! everything’s
broken, when I evict you you’ve got to pay to replace everything, buddy!
what do you mean, you don’t have no fucking money?
what do you buy all that booze with?
credit?
don’t give me that!
listen, I want it so quiet in here tonight we’ll be able to hear the
church mice pray!
what’s that?
well, up yours too, buddy!
and you wanna know what?
I saw your old lady sucking some guy’s banana in the alley!
you don’t give a damn?
what do you give a damn about?
nothing?
what kind of shit is that,
nothing
!
did you get a lobotomy somewhere along the way?
I got a good mind to wipe up the floor with you!
you say I’m the one with a lobotomy?
hey, don’t go closing the door on me, pal!
I own this fucking place!
OPEN UP, BUDDY! I’M COMING IN!
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?
HEY, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?
we are in the clubhouse
3rd race, 83 degrees in June,
they have just sent in a 40-to-1 shot
in a maiden race,
the tote has clicked 3 or 4 times,
the old general feeling of futility
has arrived early
and then a girl walks by
to the window to make a bet
her skirt is slit
almost to the waist
and as she walks
this
most beautiful leg
is exposed
it sneaks out as she walks
flashes and vanishes.
every male in the clubhouse
watches that leg.
the girl is with a woman
who looks like her mother
and her mother keeps close
to the side of the skirt
that is slit,
trying to block our view.
the girl makes her bet
turns and now the leg is on
the other side
along with her mother.
the girl disappears down an
aisle to her seat
as all around us
there is a rising,
silent applause.
then the applause stops
and like forsaken children
we go back to our
Racing Forms.
this woman at the counter ahead of me
was buying four pairs of panties:
yellow, pink, blue and orange.
the lady at the register kept picking up
the panties and
counting them:
one, two, three, four.
then she counted them again:
one, two, three, four.
will there be anything else?
she asked the lady who was buying the
panties.
no, that’s it, she answered.
no cigarettes or anything?
no, that’s it.
the woman at the register
rang up the sale
collected the money
gave change
looked off into the distance
for a bit
and then she bent under the counter
and got a bag
and put the panties in this bag
one at a time—
first the blue pair, then the yellow,
then the orange, then the pink.
she looked at me next:
how are you doing today?
fair, I said.
is there anything else?
cigarettes?
all I want is what you see in front of
you.
I had hemorrhoid ointment
laxatives
and a box of paper clips.
she rang it up, took my money, made
change, bagged my things, handed them
to me.
have a nice day, she did not say.
and you too,
I said.
son, my father said, if you only had some
ambition! you have no
get up and go! no
drive!
it’s hard for me to believe that you are really
my son.
yeah, I
said.
I mean, he went on, how are you going to
make it?
your mother is worried sick and the neighbors
think you’re some kind of
imbecile.
what are you going to
do?
we can’t take care of you
all
your
life!
I’m 15 now, I told him, I won’t be around
much longer.
but
look
at you, you just sit around in your room
all day! other
boys have jobs, paper routes, Jim Stover works
as an usher at the
Bayou!
HOW IN THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO
SURVIVE IN THIS
WORLD?
I don’t
know …
you make me SICK! sometimes, having a son like
you, I wish I was
dead.
well, he did die, he died more than 30 years
ago.
and last year I paid
$59,000 income
tax.
there are some people who will
phone a man at 7 a.m.
when he is desperately sick and
hungover.
I always greet
these idiots
with a few violent
words
and the slamming
down of the
receiver
knowing that their
morning eagerness
means that
they retired early
and thus wasted the
preceding
night
(and most likely
the preceding days, weeks and
years).
that they could
imagine
that
I’d want to
converse with
them
at 7 a.m.
is an insult
to
whatever
intelligent life
is left
in our dwindling
universe.
he hung the green Cadillac
almost straight up and down
standing on its nose
against the phone pole
next to the
All-American Hamburger
Hut.
I was
in the laundromat
with my girlfriend when
we heard the sound of it.
when we got there
the driver had
dropped out of the car
and run off.
and there was the
green Caddy
standing straight
up and down
against
the phone pole.
it was one of the most
magnificent sights
I had seen
in years:
in the 9 p.m. moonlight
it just stood there—
the people gathered
the people stood back
knowing the Caddy
could come crashing down
at any moment
but it didn’t
it just stood there
straight as an arrow
alongside
the phone pole.
how the hell
they were going to get
that down
without wrecking it
was beyond me.
my girlfriend wanted to
wait and see how
they did it
but we hadn’t
had dinner
yet
and I
talked her into
going back into the
laundromat and then
back to my place.
I was not
mechanically inclined
and it pissed
me off
to watch people
who were.
anyhow
about noon
the next day
when I went out to
buy a newspaper
the green Caddy
was gone.
there was just
an old bum
at the counter
in the All-American
having a coffee
but I had already seen
the real miracle
and I
walked back to
my place
satisfied.