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.

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

working it out

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times we will know it

No help for that

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

Education

it has been a beautiful fight still is.

Cornered

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

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

redefine poetry, fake poets

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

poem a good time

it doesn’t matter if Prince Charles falls off his horse or that the hummingbird is so seldom seen or that we are too senseless to go insane. coffee. give us more of that NOTHING

“the damage has been done,” I told her. “what’re you talking about?” “nothing matters and we know nothing matters and that matters…”

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

searching my coat for cigarettes. nothing.

nerves: large crowds of people more than unsettle me.

life in America was a curious thing.

the shrink said, “you’re one of the sanest men I’ve ever met.” poor Al. that made him feel worse than ever.

trying to be a writer I wrote and wrote and drank and drank and drank and then stopped writing and concentrated on the drinking. it was another art-form.

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

he smelled of death and darkness but he kept moving forward

he was like a creature not of the earth.

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.

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

think about it, Captain Walrus, the plum is in the pudding and the parasol bends to the West wind 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. this writer’s block is my only possession.

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

putrefaction of late I’ve had this thought that this country has gone backwards 4 or 5 decades 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 more than ever the selfish wants of power the disregard for the weak the old the impoverished the helpless. we are replacing want with war salvation with slavery. we have wasted the gains we have become rapidly less. we have our Bomb it is our fear our damnation and our shame. now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.

maybe I’m going crazy, that’s all right but these poems keep rising to the top of my head with more and more force.

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—

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.

there was a strange gnawing inside of me but I never dreamed this luck this absolute shot of grace my death will at most seem an afterthought.

now Death is a plant growing in my mind not much to hang on to in this early morning growling.

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

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

the people are weary, unhappy and frustrated, the people are bitter and vengeful, the people are deluded and fearful, the people are angry and uninventive

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.

a large portion of my readers want me to keep writing about bedding down with madwomen and streetwalkers— also, about being in jails and hospitals, or starving or puking my guts out.

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

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

part of the whole no matter how seemingly useless and stupid and once great thoughts often with time become useless and stupid.

but Schopenhauer’s rage was so beautiful so well placed that I laughed out loud then put him down next to Nietzsche who was also all too human.

I heard the man say, “that guy’s nuts.” out on the street I walked north feeling curiously honored.

and I thought, we are all doomed together, that’s all there is to it.

I’ve gotten this far and that’s plenty.

there’s nothing to discuss there’s nothing to remember there’s nothing to forget it’s sad and it’s not sad

it was a shameful waste of madhouse time.

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

the same old show which he will one day end alone blowing his brains to the walls.

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

there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible— not in self-pity but with dismay