Love is a Dog from Hell

by Charles Bukowski

the 6 foot goddess

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I didn’t fly all the way to Galveston to play chess.”

She has saved me from everything that is not here.

one of the hottest

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You boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.

the drill

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Human relationships simply aren’t durable.

the spider

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an almost made up poem

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I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.

all lovers betray.

and I will walk about in my floppy shorts smoking too many cigarettes and trying to make drama out of no damned progress at all.

And they came with flashlights and asked what we were doing and she said, “kissing!” one of the cops looked at me and said, “I don’t blame you,”

Nobody has soul enough to overcome nerves.

I know this poet: he’s just like the rest of us: he’ll vomit anywhere for money.

what they want

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how to be a great writer

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Learning to win is hard— any slob can be a good loser.

And if you have the ability to love love yourself first

the price

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There’s no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate.

They disgust me the way they wait for death with as much passion as a traffic signal.

462-0614

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natural guts defeating natural talent that’s the best

the meek have inherited

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We’re all scared but when you’re ugly and you don’t have much left you get strong, and

Spit out cotton and clean your rearview mirror, run like you mean it, drunk jock, the whores will win, the fools will win, but break like a horse out of the gate.

There is always one woman to save you from another And as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.

longshot

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I’m going to bet the 4 horse, I told him. Well, it’s only that I’d like to turn her around in mid-stream, save her, you might say.

It’s not the fucking and sucking alone that reaches into a man and softens him, it’s the extras, it’s all the extras.

I would give anything for a female’s hand on me tonight. They soften a man and then leave him listening to the rain.

Now she’s gone gone as they go.

an unkind poem

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They won’t write short stories or articles or novels they just go on pumping out poems each sounding more and more like the others and less and less like themselves, and some of the young boys weary and quit but the professors never quit and the wives who drink wine in the afternoons never ever ever quit and new young boys arrive with new magazines and there is some correspondence with lady or men poets and some fucking and everything is exaggerated and dull.

When the poems come back they retype them and send them off to the next magazine on the list, and they give readings all the readings they can for free most of the time hoping that somebody will finally know finally applaud them finally congratulate and recognize their talent they are all so sure of their genius there is so little self-doubt, and most of them live in North Beach or New York City,

the bee

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While drunk I fingerfuck this 19 year old groupie in bed with me. But the worst part is (like jumping off the garage roof) Eugene wins again because he’s not even thinking about me.

“Where were you,” I asked her, “when I was living on one candy bar a day and sending short stories to the Atlantic Monthly?”

realize that people who keep talking about sexual liberation are more frightened than you are.

Never consider yourself superior and/ or fair and never try to be.

Then after all this reverse the procedure. Have a good love affair. And the thing you might learn is that nobody knows anything—

the Greek

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my comrades

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soul

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That wasn’t his problem, she said. By the way, how come you flog-off so much? It’s the space, I said, all that space between poems and stories, it’s intolerable.

the place didn’t look bad

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She had huge thighs and a very good laugh she laughed at everything and the curtains were yellow and I finished rolled off and before she went to the bathroom she reached under the bed and threw me a rag. It was hard it was stiff with other men’s sperm. I wiped off on the sheet. When she came out she bent over and I saw all that behind as she put Mozart on.

bedpans

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The hardest part of dying is that they expect you to go out like a rocket shot into the night sky. Sometimes that can be done But when you need the bullet and the gun you’ll look up and find that the wires above your head connected to the button years ago have been cut snipped eliminated been made useless as the bedpan.