You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

drunk still big not so young.

these days

Norman, you would never guess what has happened to me what has happened to all of us.

I remember your saying: “make it or break it.” neither happened and it won’t.

the price of creation is never too high. the price of living with other people always is.

I can remember starving in a small room in a strange city shades pulled down, listening to classical music

I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible—

the old composers—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and they were dead.

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

(that’s when I thought about Hamsun’s Hunger—where he ate his own flesh; I once took a bite of my wrist but it was very salty).

anyhow, one night in Miami Beach (I have no idea what I was doing in that city) I had not eaten in 60 hours

meeee

my party was not to be.

yeeeeesh

I’ve been so down in the mouth lately that sometimes when I bend over to lace my shoes there are three tongues.

he was the only living writer I ever met who I truly admired and he was dying when I met him.

“the worst thing,” he told me, “is bitterness, people end up so bitter.”

the writing of some men is like a vast bridge that carries you over the many things that claw and tear.

book on one side, cat on the other…

“agony, always agony…” think of this when you kill a cockroach or pick up a razor to shave or awaken in the morning to face the sun.

were supposed to be outlaws the explorers of Truth but I liked the music and the laziness of waiting as the world rushed toward war

that last bright sunshine we warmed ourselves in it shutting away everything else while the universe opened its mouth in an attempt to swallow us all.

“poor boy: the devil is inside of you.” she said the devil was inside her husband too.

she wasn’t very interesting but few people are.

this doesn’t please me either because somehow I believe that to be the world’s greatest living writer there must be something terribly wrong with you.

I don’t even want to be the world’s greatest dead writer. just being dead would be fair enough.

just think how much more pleasing it would be to hear: you are the world’s greatest pool player or you are the world’s greatest fucker or you are the world’s greatest horseplayer.

of course, I had lost much blood maybe it was a different kind of dying but I still had enough left to wonder about the absence of fear.

as you eat and drink you realize that everybody is terrorized:

too bad too bad such a lovely city full of cowards.

girls please give your bodies and your lives to the young men who deserve them

important

there is no way I would welcome the intolerable dull senseless hell you would bring me

and I wish you luck in bed and out but not in mine

new breakup line

they’re not going to let you feel good for very long anywhere.

as long as there are human beings about there is never going to be any peace for

something is working toward you right now, and I mean you and nobody but you.

having nothing to struggle against they have nothing to struggle for. the rich are different all right

“looking at you people,” I said, “makes me feel like vomiting all over your inept plausibilities!”

when we were kids laying around the lawn on our bellies we often talked about how we’d like to die

we all agreed on the same thing: we’d all like to die fucking

and now that we are hardly kids any longer we think more about how not to die and although we’re ready most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have fucked our lives away.

I was young but always alone—I felt that I needed the time to get something done and the only way I could buy time was with poverty.

I worked not so much with craft but more with getting down what was edging me toward madness—and I had flashes of luck, but it was hardly a pleasurable existence.

ah, you have no idea, in that dark freezing shack, how much I wanted to be poor in Italy instead of Atlanta,

the past 20 years of my life...

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.

when confronted with dutiful policemen or women in rancor I have nothing to say to them for if I truly began it would end in somebody’s death: theirs or mine

I let them have their little victories which they need far more than I do.

it began so well then it went to hell.

“I wonder what she’s doing now?” “probably engaging in oral copulation,” Henry suggested.

in that depression neighborhood I had two buddies

anyhow, Eugene became a Commander in the Navy and Frank became a Supreme Court Justice, State of California and I fiddled with the poem.

I was on cheap wine and green beer and dementia…

I liked him: he never questioned me about what I was or wasn’t doing.