On Love

by Charles Bukowski

some say we should keep personal remorse from the poem, stay abstract, and there is some reason in this, but jezus: 12 poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have my paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling: are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them? why didn’t you take my money? they usually do from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner. next time take my left arm or a fifty but not my poems: I’m not Shakespeare but sometimes simply there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise; there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards down to the last bomb, but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

mixing rope,

but what can I make of love when we are all born at a different time and place and only meet through a trick of centuries and a chance three steps to the left?