You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

it was another art-form. if you can’t have any luck with one thing you try another.

also. it was a world full of drunks and writers and drunk writers. and so I became a starving drunk instead of a starving writer.

of course, I never really considered quitting the writing game, I just wanted to give it a ten year rest figuring if I got famous too early I wouldn’t have anything left for the stretch run like I have now, thank you, with the drinking still thrown in.

and I forced my eyes to focus and saw this man staggering his clothing ripped and bloody he smelled of death and darkness but he kept moving forward down the middle of the street as if he had been walking for miles from some event so ugly that the mind itself might refuse to accept it as part of life.

couldn’t see me, he moved forward looking for somewhere to go, anywhere,

I saw one of his eyes hanging out of the socket, dangling. I backed away. he was like a creature not of the earth. I let him go by.

blind steps lurching, in agony, senselessly alone.

I got back on the sidewalk. I got back to my room. I got myself to the bed. fell face up the ceiling up there above me, I waited.

when I got sick of the bar and I sometimes did I had a place to go:

it was a tall field of grass an abandoned graveyard. I didn’t consider this to be a morbid pastime. it just seemed to be the best place to be.

Yes

the stones, many were tilted at strange angles against gravity as though they must fall but I never saw one fall although there were many of those in the yard.

I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better. just like, at times, I needed that graveyard.

in conjunction with these rivers of shit that keep rolling through my brain, Captain Walrus,

I can only say that I hardly understand it and would say any number of HAIL MARYS to put a stop to it

that whore with the heart of brass

me

but of course I would never stop playing the horses or drinking but Captain to keep these rivers from flowing I’d promise to never eat eggs again and I’d shave my head and my balls, I’d live in the state of Delaware and I’d even force myself to sit through any movie acted in by any member of the Fonda family.

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.

I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.

I am out of cigarettes and don’t even have a gun to point.

Mood

I always wanted to be a writer now I’m one who can’t.

yep.

what a sight: an empty man being careful not to trip and bang his empty head.

and that all the social advancement the good feeling of person toward person has been washed away and replaced by the same old bigotries.

we have wasted the gains we have become rapidly less.

now after the oceans of booze that I have consumed it would only seem that attrition would be my rightful reward as I continue to consume—while the madhouses, skidrows and graveyards are filled with the likes of me— yet each night as I sit down to this machine with my bottle the poems flare and jump out, on and on—

the gods have been kind to me through this life-style that would have killed an ox of a man and I’m no ox of a man.

my death will at most seem an afterthought.

then too the few people that I have known, the people I thought had that little extra flare that inventive humanity, well, they dissolved but

not much to hang on to in this early morning growling.

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

now Death is a plant growing in my mind

I am sad for the dead and I am sad for the living

it took me a long time to find the most interesting person to drink with: myself, like this, now reaching to my left for the last glass of the Blood of the Lamb.

(the lines indicated the age of the whore: the shorter the line the older the whore)

we each at times should remember the most elevated and lucky moment of our lives.

being a very young man and sleeping penniless and friendless upon a park bench in a strange city

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

and I drive among them on the freeway and they project what is left of themselves in their manner of driving—

the freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions, it’s humanity on the move, most of them coming from some place they hated and going to another they hate just as much or more.

the freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives.

when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it’s ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away.

if you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.

I agree that complacency hardly engenders an immortal literature but neither does repetition.

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

HEY, I hollered across the room to her, DRINK SOME WINE OUT OF YOUR SHOE! WHY? she screamed. BECAUSE THIS USELESSNESS NEEDS SOME GAMBLE!

then I had a good roaring drink and I thought, we are all doomed together, that’s all there is to it. (that’s all there was to that particular drink, just like all the others.)

seems the most sensible thing a person can do is sit with drink in hand as the walls wave their goodbye smiles

<3

when a man is living many claim relationships that are hardly so and after he dies, well, then it’s everybody’s party.

Norman and I, both 19, striding the streets of night…feeling big, young young, big and young

1939 after having listened to Stravinsky not long after, the war got Norman.