The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993

by Charles Bukowski

on the sidewalk and in the sun I have seen an old man around town recently carrying an enormous pack. he uses a walking stick and moves up and down the streets with this pack strapped to his back. I keep seeing him. if he’d only throw that pack away, I think, he’d have a chance, not much of a chance but a chance. and he’s in a tough district—east Hollywood. they aren’t going to give him a dry bone in east Hollywood. he is lost. with that pack. on the sidewalk and in the sun. god almighty, old man, I think, throw away that pack. then I drive on, thinking of my own problems. the last time I saw him he was not walking. it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent, the pack still strapped to his back. I slowed down to look at his face. I had seen one or two other men in my life with looks on their faces like that. I speeded up and turned on the radio. I knew that look. I would never see him again.

Love

Carson McCullers she died of alcoholism wrapped in a blanket on a deck chair on an ocean steamer. all her books of terrified loneliness all her books about the cruelty of loveless love were all that was left of her as the strolling vacationer disthe ship as everything continued just as she had written it.

Love

trashcan lives the wind blows hard tonight and it’s a cold wind and I think about the boys on the row. I hope some of them have a bottle of red. it’s when you’re on the row that you notice that everything is owned and that there are locks on everything. this is the way a democracy works: you get what you can, try to keep that and add to it

Good

art as the spirit wanes the form appears.

Love

girl in a miniskirt reading the Bible outside my window Sunday. I am eating a grapefruit. church is over at the Russian Orthodox to the west. she is dark of Eastern descent, large brown eyes look up from the Bible then down. a small red and black Bible, and as she reads her legs keep moving, moving, she is doing a slow rhythmic dance reading the Bible … long gold earrings; 2 gold bracelets on each arm, and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose, the cloth hugs her body, the lightest of tans is that cloth, she twists this way and that, long young legs warm in the sun … there is no escaping her being there is no desire to … my radio is playing symphonic music that she cannot hear but her movements coincide exactly to the rhythms of the symphony … she is dark, she is dark she is reading about God. I am God.

Love

no leaders, please invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don’t swim in the same slough. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate yourself and accept what is but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented. be self-taught. and reinvent your life because you must; it is your life and its history and the present belong only to you.

Love

now I had boils the size of tomatoes all over me they stuck a drill into me down at the county hospital, and just as the sun went down every day there was a man in a nearby ward he’d start hollering for his friend Joe. JOE! he’d holler, OH JOE! JOE! J O E! COME GET ME, JOE! Joe never came by. I’ve never heard such mournful sounds. Joe was probably working off a piece of ass or attempting to solve a

Good

The Genius of the Crowd There is enough treachery, hatred, violence, Absurdity in the average human being To supply any given army on any given day. AND The Best At Murder Are Those Who Preach Against It. AND The Best At Hate Are Those Who Preach LOVE AND THE BEST AT WAR —FINALLY—ARE THOSE WHO PREACH PEACE Those Who Preach GOD NEED God Those Who Preach PEACE Do Not Have Peace. THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE DO NOT HAVE

Brilliant

eulogy to a hell of a dame some dogs who sleep at night must dream of bones and I remember your bones in flesh and best in that dark green dress and those high-heeled bright black shoes, you always cursed when you drank, your hair coming down you wanted to explode out of what was holding you: rotten memories of a rotten past, and you finally got out

Good

oh, yes there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it’s too late and there’s nothing worse than too late.

Love

what? sleepy now at 4 a.m. I hear the siren of a white ambulance, then a dog barks once in this tough-boy Christmas morning.

Good

the stress of continually facing the lowered horn is wearing. then too I sometimes think of a less stressful kind of love— it can and should be so easy like falling asleep in a chair or like a church full of windows. sad enough,

Good

life of the king I awaken at 11:30 a.m. get into my chinos and a clean green shirt open a Miller’s, and nothing in the mailbox but the Berkeley Tribe which I don’t subscribe to, and on KUSC there is organ music something by Bach and I leave the door open stand on the porch walk out front hot damn that air is good and the sun like golden butter on my body. no racetrack today, nothing but this

the crunch too much too little too fat too thin or nobody. laughter or tears haters lovers strangers with faces like the backs of thumb tacks armies running through streets of blood waving winebottles bayoneting and fucking virgins.

Good

old guy in a cheap room with a photograph of M. Monroe. there is a loneliness

sometimes during the day I will look at the house and the house will look at me and the house will weep, yes, it does, I feel it. the house is sad for the people living there and I am too and we look at each other and cars go up and down the street, boats cross the harbor and the tall palms poke at the sky and tonight at 9 p.m. the lights will go out, and not only in that house and not only in this city. safe lives hiding, almost stopped, the breathing of bodies and little else. starve, go mad, or kill yourself I’m not going to die easy; I’ve sat on your suicide beds in some of the worst holes in America, penniless and mad I’ve been, I mean, insane, you know; big tears, each one the size of your bastard hearts, flowing down, roaches crawling into my shoes, one dirty 40-watt lightbulb overhead and a room that smelled like piss; while your rich your falsely famous laughed in safe stale places far away,

the burning of the dream the old L.A. Public Library burned down that library downtown and with it went a large part of my youth. I sat on one of those stone benches there with my friend Baldy when he asked, “you gonna join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?” “sure,” I told him. but realizing that I wasn’t an intellectual or

Gooxd

A Love Poem all the women all their kisses the different ways they love and talk and need. their ears they all have ears and throats and dresses and shoes and automobiles and ex- husbands. mostly the women are very warm they remind me of buttered toast with the butter melted in. there is a look in the

Good

the area of pause you have to have it or the walls will close in. you have to give everything up, throw it away, everything away. you have to look at what you look at or think what you think or do what you do or don’t do without considering personal advantage without accepting guidance. people are worn away with striving, they hide in common habits. their concerns are herd

Good

relentless as the tarantula they’re not going to let you sit at a front table at some cafe in Europe in the mid-afternoon sun. if you do, somebody’s going to drive by and spray your guts with a submachine gun. they’re not going to let you feel good for very long anywhere. the forces aren’t going to let you sit around fucking off and relaxing. you’ve got

Brilliant

the replacements Jack London drinking his life away while writing of strange and heroic men. Eugene O’Neill drinking himself oblivious while writing his dark and poetic works. now our moderns lecture at universities in tie and suit, the little boys soberly studious, the little girls with glazed eyes looking up, the lawns so green, the books so dull, the life so dying of thirst.

Brilliant

the lisp I had her for 3 units and at mid-term she’d read off how many assignments stories had been turned in: “Gilbert: 2 … Ginsing: 5 … McNulty: 4 … Frijoles: none … Lansford: 2 … Bukowski: 38 …” the class laughed and she lisped that not only did Bukowski write many stories but that they were all of high quality.

Good

a gold pocket watch my grandfather was a tall German with a strange smell on his breath. he stood very straight in front of his small house and his wife hated him and his children thought him odd. I was six the first time we met and he gave me all his war medals. the second time I met him he gave me his gold pocket watch. it was very heavy and I took it home and wound it very tight and it stopped running which made me feel bad. I never saw him again and my parents never spoke of him nor did my grandmother who had long ago

Best

the proud thin dying I see old people on pensions in the supermarkets and they are thin and they are proud and they are dying they are starving on their feet and saying nothing. long ago, among other lies, they were taught that silence was bravery. now, having worked a lifetime, inflation has trapped them. they look around steal a grape chew on it. finally they make a tiny purchase, a day’s worth. another lie they were taught: thou shalt not steal. they’d rather starve than steal (one grape won’t save them) and in tiny rooms while reading the market ads they’ll starve

Best

about pain my first and only wife painted and she talked to me about it: “it’s all so painful for me, each stroke is pain … one mistake and the whole painting is ruined … you will never understand the pain …” “look, baby,” I said, “why doncha do something easy— something ya like ta do?”

Good

I’m in love she’s young, she said, but look at me, I have pretty ankles, and look at my wrists, I have pretty wrists o my god, I thought it was all working, and now it’s her again, every time she phones you go crazy, you told me it was over you told me it was finished, listen, I’ve lived long enough to become a good woman, why do you need a bad woman? you need to be tortured, don’t you? you think life is rotten if somebody treats you rotten it all fits, doesn’t it?

Great

the girls the girls I have been looking at the same lampshade for 5 years and it has gathered a bachelor’s dust and the girls who enter here are too busy to clean it but I don’t mind I have been too busy to notice

Good

tonight “your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone,” my editor phones me. dear editor: the girls appear to be gone already. I know what you mean but give me one truly alive woman tonight walking across the floor toward me and you can have all the poems the good ones the bad ones or any that I might write after this one. I know what you mean. do you know what I mean?

Good match with poem called girls a few page back

hug the dark turmoil is the god madness is the god permanent living peace is permanent living death. agony can kill or agony can sustain life but peace is always horrifying peace is the worst thing walking talking smiling, seeming to be. don’t forget the sidewalks the whores, betrayal,

Good

street billboard there he is: not too many hangovers not too many fights with women not too many flat tires never a thought of suicide not more than three toothaches never missed a meal never in jail never in love 7 pairs of shoes a son in college a car one year old insurance policies a very green lawn garbage cans with tight lids he’ll be elected.

Brilliant best ever

white dog I went for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard. I looked down and there was a large white dog walking beside me. his pace was exactly the same as mine. we stopped at traffic signals together. we crossed the side streets together. a woman smiled at us. he must have walked 8 blocks with me. then I went into a grocery store and when I came out he was gone. or she was gone. the wonderful white dog with a trace of yellow in its fur. the large blue eyes were gone. the grinning mouth was gone. the lolling tongue was gone. things are so easily lost.

But is brilliant

how is your heart? during my worst times on the park benches in the jails or living with whores I always had this certain contentment— I wouldn’t call it happiness— it was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occurring and it helped in the factories and when relationships went wrong with the girls. it helped through the wars and the hangovers the backalley fights the hospitals. to awaken in a cheap room in a strange city and pull up the shade— this was the craziest kind of contentment and to walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirror— see myself, ugly, grinning at it all. what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

Love

closing time around 2 a.m. in my small room after turning off the poem machine for now I continue to light cigarettes and listen to Beethoven on the radio. I listen with a strange and lazy aplomb, knowing there’s still a poem or two left to write, and I feel damn fine, at long last, as once again I admire the verve and gamble of this composer now dead for over 100 years, who’s younger and wilder than you are than I am. the centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us. I light the next to last cigarette remember all the 2 a.m.s of my past,

Dinosauria, we born like this into this as the chalk faces smile as Mrs. Death laughs as the elevators break as political landscapes dissolve as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree as the oily fish spit out their oily prey as the sun is masked we are born like this into this into these carefully mad wars into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness into bars where people no longer speak to each

twilight musings the drifting of the mind. the slow loss, the leaking away. one’s demise is not very interesting. from my bed I watch 3 birds through the east window: one coal black, one dark brown, the other yellow. as night falls I watch the red lights on the bridge blink on and off. I am stretched out in bed with the covers up to my chin. I have no idea who won at the racetrack today. I must go back into the hospital tomorrow. why me? why not?

the bluebird there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you. there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he’s in there. there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe? there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody’s asleep. I say, I know that you’re there, so don’t be sad. then I put him back, but he’s singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?

love