You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

everything is so sweetly awful, so continuously and sweetly awful: the art of consummation: life eating life…

we’ve got the power of sanity here.

these early a.m. mornings when almost everybody is asleep, small night bugs, winged things

I’ve got to do something about all this… it seems like it never stops. each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.

for those readers now sick at heart believing that I’m a contented man— please have some cheer: agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.

death doesn’t matter but the ultimate inconvenience of near-death is worse than galling.

I am consumed with a glad sadness

complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

that gentle pure space it’s worth centuries of existence

say just to scratch your neck while looking out the window at a bare branch that space there before they get to us ensures that when they do they won’t get it all ever.