The Pleasures of the Damned

by Charles Bukowski

wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping, feathers parted like a woman’s legs,

as we fawn over our failed traditions, often kill to preserve them or sometimes kill just to kill. it doesn’t seem to matter:

ask the fire the fire the fire—

days when children say funny and brilliant things like savages trying to send you a message through their bodies while their bodies are still alive enough to transmit and feel and run up and down without locks and paychecks and ideals and possessions and beetle-like opinions.

and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it for as long as those things stay solved in the history of woman and man, it’s different for each better and worse for each— for me, it’s splendid enough

here comes the baked potato in drag

each bent mute over a machine, crucified alive on piecework,

while fools have been elevated to the trumpet’s succulent sneer

and everything has meaning, and an editor writes me, you are good but you are too emotional the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony, study it and put it to sleep in the abstract. is there anything less abstract than dying day by day?

we are rusty with sadness and feverish with climbing broken ladders.

and hawks buzzing in peach trees, the sea running between their claws, Time drunk and damp, everything burning, everything wet, everything fine.

a record player that doesn’t work, a radio that doesn’t work, and I don’t work— I sit between 2 lamps, bottle on the floor begging a 20-year-old typewriter to say something, in a way and well enough so they won’t confuse me with the more comfortable practitioners;

there seems as much hell in it as magic; death gets as close as any lover has, closer,

—fucked by the muse, friends, thank you—