The Essential Bukowski: Poetry

by Charles Bukowski

I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

he was just a chemist who wrote music to relax;

to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o’clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.

but it’s no good: I can’t keep him alive no matter how much we hated each other.

I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar: “Kid, you’re no fighter,” he told me,

I got home I tore the tape off my hands and wrote my first poem, and I’ve been fighting ever since.

with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more;

and I walked to the rotunda and overhead gods in chariots

a poem is a city, a poem is a nation, a poem is the world . . .

the fish cry and all the water is their tears.

what you were will not happen again.

chary web of your brain

I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile; she was already dead,

I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much except as a matter of disposal,

waiting for the grass to dismiss the frost

BEWARE THE PREACHERS Beware The Knowers.

nations moving people like pawns;

in New York City where it gets colder and they are hunted by their own kind, these men often crawl under car radiators, drink the antifreeze, get warm and grateful for some minutes, then die.

this then will be my destiny: scrabbling for pennies in dark tiny halls reading poems I have long since become tired of.

after all the threats to do so somebody else has committed suicide for me at last.

striding down through centuries would not listen.

humanity, you never had it from the beginning.

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

what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame—not the beautiful young girl in bed with them,

that’s what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe dreary admirers of carnivals.

I act very bitter sometimes but the taste has often been sweet,

all her books of terrified loneliness

memory is a trap: look to the walls and begin again.

the pets refused to go out and left their waste in strange places.

and an invisible chicken in every pot.

I thought of Noah and the Ark and I thought, it has come again. we all thought that.

the truth was just too awful and embarrassing to tell.

it’s dark and cold out here.

I was a bum in San Francisco but once managed to go to a symphony concert along with the well-dressed people

I preferred to listen to the music alone on my radio

which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do.

and climax, and through the shared wall of our darkness.

as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree

into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die

rain will be the new gold

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.

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.

I am all the colors of all the silks,

I am the horseplayer who became the racetrack.

youth was no wonder either.

your life is your life.

people are not good to each other. people are not good to each other. people are not good to each other. I suppose they never will be.

more haters than lovers.