The Essential Bukowski: Poetry

by Charles Bukowski

friendly advice to a lot of young men, and a lot of old men, too Go to Tibet. Ride a camel. Read the Bible. Paint your shoes blue. Grow a beard. Circle the world in a paper canoe. Subscribe to the Saturday Evening Post. Chew on the left side of your mouth only. Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor. And carve your name in her anus. Brush your teeth with gasoline. Sleep all day and climb trees at night. Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer. Hold your head under water and play the violin. Do a belly dance before pink candles. Kill your dog. Run for mayor. Live in a barrel. Break your head with a hatchet. Plant tulips in the rain. But don’t write any more poetry.

I met a genius I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, “it’s not pretty.” it was the first time I’d realized that.

style style is the answer to everything— a fresh way to approach a dull or a dangerous thing. to do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. Joan of Arc had style John the Baptist Christ Socrates Caesar, García Lorca. style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done. 6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water or you walking out of the bathroom naked without seeing me.

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 covers 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.

some people never go crazy. what truly horrible lives they must live.

it’s the order of things: each one gets a taste of honey then the knife.

I have been robbed of my filth.

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.

luck once we were young at this machine . . . drinking smoking typing it was a most splendid miraculous time still is only now instead of moving toward time it moves toward us makes each word drill into the paper clear fast hard feeding a closing space.

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.

8 count from my bed I watch 3 birds on a telephone wire. one flies off. then another. one is left, then it too is gone. my typewriter is tombstone still. and I am reduced to bird watching. just thought I’d let you know, fucker.

no leaders invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don’t slough in the slime. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, stay out of the clutches of mediocrity and self-pity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so that they can never find you. recharge yourself. accept continuance but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented. be self-instructed. invent life, it is you, the history of its past and the presence of its presentness. there is nothing else, nothing.

to lean back into it like in a chair the color of the sun as you listen to lazy piano music and the aircraft overhead are not for war. where the last drink is as good as the first and you realize that the promises you made yourself were kept. that’s plenty. that last: about the promises. what’s not so good is that the few friends you had are dead and they seem irreplaceable. on women, you didn’t know enough early and too much too late. and if self-analysis is allowed: nice that you turned out well- honed, that you arrived late and remain generally capable. outside of that, not much. except you can leave without regret. until then, a bit more play, a bit more endurance, leaning back into it, like the dog who got across the busy street: not all of it was good luck.

do you want to enter the arena? if it doesn’t come rushing out of you, don’t do it. unless it comes bursting out of your ears and your head and your ass and your bellybutton, don’t do it. if you have to sit for an hour staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rework it, rewrite it, don’t do it. if it’s hard work doing it, don’t do it. if you’re trying to write like somebody else, don’t do it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait. if it never roars out of you, do something else. if you have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or anybody at all, you’re not ready. don’t be like so many writers, don’t be so like so many thousands of writers who call themselves writers, don’t be so dull and boring and pretentious, don’t lock in with self-love. don’t work the pages to death with your crap. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep. don’t add to that, don’t do it. unless it comes bursting through your skull like a rocket, unless being still about it would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside of you is burning your guts out, don’t do it. when it is known to you truly, it will do it by itself and it will keep doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. there neve...

a new war a different fight now, warding off the weariness of old age, retreating to your room, stretching out upon the bed, there’s not much will to move, it’s near midnight now. not so long ago your night would be just beginning, but don’t lament lost youth: youth was no wonder either. but now it’s the waiting on death. it’s not death that’s the problem, it’s the waiting. you should have been dead decades ago. the abuse you loaded upon yourself was enormous and non-ending. a different fight now, yes, but nothing to mourn about, only to note. frankly, it’s even a bit dull waiting on the blade. and to think, after I’m gone, there will be more for others, other days, other nights. dogs walking sidewalks, trees shaking in the wind. I won’t be leaving much. something to read, maybe. a wild onion in the gutted road. Paris in the dark.

the laughing heart your life is your life. don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them, take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.