Love is a Dog from Hell

by Charles Bukowski

an art

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“Hank, nobody loves you if you don’t have money.”

the beautiful young girl walking past the graveyard—

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my old man

*

after the reading

he knows he stumbled ass backward into fame

“ambition rarely has anything to do with talent. Luck is best, and talent limps along a little bit behind luck.”

There is that which helps you believe in something else besides death: somebody in a car approaching on a street too narrow, and he or she pulls aside to let you by, or the old fighter Beau Jack shining shoes after blowing the entire bankroll on parties on women on parasites, humming, breathing on the leather, working the rag looking up and saying: “what the hell, I had it for a while. That beats the other.”