You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

poet (?): that word needs re- defining.

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it was one of those times where nothing was lost because nothing had ever been found

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at the finish line I had to turn my back to the crowd and climb the upper grandstand steps to the wall so the people wouldn’t see me cry.

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I have just listened to this symphony which Mozart dashed off in one day and it had enough wild and crazy joy to last forever, whatever forever is Mozart came as close as possible to that.

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I drank alone for two years after that.

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

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life in America was a curious thing. well, I could let the interest build that’s what the government did but after a while they would come for me or whatever I had left. at least that $50 loss at the track didn’t look so bad anymore.

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it’s only after they move in and begin acting more than strange that they admit to him that they’ve done madhouse time or that their families have a long history of mental illness.

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they edit so many of the magazines that I have no idea where I should send this poem

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since they attack my work with alarming regularity and I can’t read theirs

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it was another art-form.

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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.

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

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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.

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agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

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the waitress who had been standing there asked me, “he was joking, wasn’t he?” “no,” I said. I paid, got up, walked to the door, opened it. I heard the man say, “that guy’s nuts.”

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also, the word “writer” is a very tiresome word. 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. now that would really make a man feel good.

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it confused me and I suppose I needed that.

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

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having nothing to struggle against they have nothing to struggle for.

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most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have fucked our lives away.

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

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that crazy son of a bitch, he was a lyric poem himself.

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some want me to go on writing about whores and puking. others say that type of thing disgusts them. well, I don’t miss the whores although now and then one or another makes an attempt to locate me.

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regret is mostly caused by not having done anything.

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“Chinaski, you got a following in Denver…” “yeah?” “yeah, I got a magazine and I want some poems from you…” “FUCK YOU, CHINASKI!” I heard a voice in the background… “I see you have a friend,”

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I was a crazed young man and then found this book written by a crazed older man and I felt better because he was able to write it down

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the gods seldom give but so quickly take.

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