You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

some men never die and some men never live but we’re all alive tonight.

it’s a matter of chemical imbalance and an existence which, at times, seems to forbid any real chance at happiness.

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

these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

actually, her life is boring and rather common but most are—mine is too except when lifted by whiskey

and we read the Sunday papers on Monday after digging them out of the trash cans but somehow we managed money for wine

they have written so poorly: they have been protected against the actualities from the beginning and they understand nothing but the ends of their fingernails

I get what many will consider an obnoxious thought: it’s still nice to be Bukowski.

“nothing matters and we know nothing matters and that matters…”

whatever forever is Mozart came as close as possible to that.

the courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.

I was their bar freak, they needed me

each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.

my death will at most seem an afterthought.

Fame is the last whore, all the others are gone.

I am sad for the dead and I am sad for the living but not for my 5 cats or for my wife, my wife who will find her place in heaven. and as for the people dissolved

“THERE AIN’T NOTHIN’ NOWHERE,” he said, “AND IT’S GETTING TO BE LESS THAN NOTHING ALL THE TIME!”

most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives.