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.

naturally, we are all caught in downmoods, it’s a matter of chemical imbalance and an existence which, at times, seems to forbid any real chance at happiness.

it looked like a damned good card that day. all I had to do was be there.

it’s a lonely time, she sings, and you’re not mine and it makes me feel so bad, this thing of being me…

we only have ourselves to go on, and it’s enough…

I return upstairs and my two cats follow me, they are fine fellows, we have no discontent, we have no arguments, we listen to the same music, never vote for a president.

the impossibility of being human

Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato

Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility

the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

only they either enslave or destroy their derelicts. we just forget ours. in either case it’s a hard cold wind.

can’t forgive either of them for their rich dumb lives and I can’t forgive their precious toys either

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.

<3

“succeed or suck eggs…”

I had no particular idea who he was talking to, and personally I thought him a crazed and stupid brute

I adore this

interspersed

Dope word

it seemed to me that I had never met another person on earth as discouraging to my happiness

“You are a bum,” he told me, “and you’ll always be a bum!” and I thought, if being a bum is to be the opposite of what this son-of-a-bitch is, then that’s what I’m going to be.

and it’s too bad he’s been dead so long for now he can’t see how beautifully I’ve succeeded at that.

my mother walked along beside me. she wasn’t anything at all.

and even the trees we walked under seemed less than trees and more like everything else.

you smirk, look at her (what’s this?), you’re cut somewhere, love it, the dripping of red onto your dirty torn undershirt, the whiskey roaring through your invincibility: you’re young, you’re big, and the world stinks from centuries of Humanity while you’re on course

another hotel drunk—thank god for hotels and whiskey and ladies of the street!

she just looks, half-believing…a cigarette dangling, she’s half- insane, looking for an out; she’s hard, she’s scared, she’s been fooled, taken, abused, used, over- used… but, under all that, to me she’s the flower, I see her as she was before she was ruined by the lies: theirs and hers.

to me, she’s new again as I am new: we have a chance together.

she likes that and I like it too because to make a thing true all you’ve got to do is believe.

I get sentimental and decide not to fuck her: one more man for her won’t help and one more woman for me won’t matter—besides, she doesn’t look that good.

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

she gets into a crying-jag, she’s cute, really, and pitiful, all she wants is what she always wanted, only it’s getting further and further away.

Yes yesszzss

seems to sit in the shade of some tarantula dream:

outside, the traffic runs up and down, down and up, going nowhere.

another casualty cat got run over now silver screw holding together a broken femur right leg bound in bright red bandage got cat home from vet’s took my eye off him for a moment he ran across floor dragging his red leg chasing the female cat worst thing the fucker could do he’s in the penalty box now sweating it out he’s just like the rest of us he has these large yellow eyes staring only wanting to live the good life.

My fav so far

I was a member of the club and I felt like a fucking fool.

this is everything

you have no idea, cousin, how many men can do it but won’t.

now they are celebrating my demise in taverns I no longer frequent.

it has been a beautiful fight still is.

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

and it went on and on and it was one of the most wonderful times of my life.

<3 i miss the chaoS

and faces become terrible things that wanted more than there was.

all our days are marked with unexpected affronts—some disastrous, others less so but the process is wearing and continuous.

most give way leaving empty spaces where people should be.

!!!!!!!!!!

it’s only the re-gathering and going on which lends substance to whatever magic might possibly evolve.

now as we ready to self-destruct there is very little left to kill which makes the tragedy less and more much much more.

!!!

behind them has been a family member usually a wife or mother supporting these souls and so it’s no wonder 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 and their delicate hairlines and their lymph nodes.

fashionably dull.

American poets pushing and hustling their talents playing at greatness.

let them have the stage so long as I need not be in the audience.

aaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHHH

now look, she said, stretched out on the bed, I don’t want anything personal, let’s just do it, I don’t want to get involved, got it? she kicked off her high-heeled shoes… sure, he said, standing there, let’s just pretend that we’ve already done it, there’s nothing less involved than that, is there? what the hell do you mean? she asked. I mean, he said, I’d rather drink anyhow. and he poured himself one.

Epic