You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

men without eyes men without faces

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

I once took a bite of my wrist but it was very salty).

the secret is in the imagination— take that away and you have dead meat.

a century back a man could be driven mad by a well-turned ankle, and why not? one could imagine that the rest would be magical indeed! now they shove it at us like a McDonald’s hamburger on a platter.

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

she wasn’t very interesting but few people are.

I believe that to be the world’s greatest living writer there must be something terribly wrong with you.

just being dead would be fair enough.

maybe it was a different kind of dying

things were going well, I was from out of town, the stranger who seldom spoke to anybody, I was the mystery man,

and I felt defeated by fate.

feeling as if they had discovered something hideously indecent about me.

we are trying to beat the percentages and each day some must fall so that others can go on.

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

something about not connecting did offend my ego

it confused me and I suppose I needed that.

listening to all that only made me drink more.

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

you’ve got to do it their way. the unhappy, the bitter and the vengeful need their fix—which is you or somebody anybody in agony,

as long as there are human beings about there is never going to be any peace for any individual upon this earth

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.

I am just another tired old man doing whatever tired old men do.

hubbub

the gods have allowed me a gentle anonymity.

my problem was that I could guess what the punch line was going to be.

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

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 worked not so much with craft but more with getting down what was edging me toward madness—

I think I showed a fine endurance but slowly then health and courage began to leak away.

the night arrived when everything fell apart—and fear, doubt, humiliation entered…

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

I have nothing to say to them for if I truly began it would end in somebody’s death: theirs or mine so I let them have their little victories which they need far more than I do.

Li Po crumbles his poems sets them on fire floats them down the river. “what have you done?” I ask him. Li passes the bottle: “they are going to end no matter what happens…” I drink to his knowledge

they float well down the river lighting up the night as good words should.

it began so well then it went to hell. those were not the words exactly but that was the meaning of the words.

our parents said nothing, let us fight on and on watching disinterestedly and finally going back to their newspapers or their radios or their thwarted sex lives, they only became angry if we tore or ruined our clothing, and for that and only for that. but Eugene and Frank and I we had some good work-outs we rumbled through the evenings, crashing through hedges, fighting along the asphalt, over the curbings and into strange front and backyards of unknown homes, the dogs barking, the people screaming at us.

we were maniacal, we never quit until the call for supper

and I fiddled with the poem.

good enough to remember now when the light is yellow and the nights are slow.

I wasn’t worth much: I had a dark small room that smelled of piss and death yet I just wanted to stay in there,

I was on cheap wine and green beer and dementia…

somehow I felt old like him;

I liked him: he never questioned me about what I was or wasn’t doing. he should have been my father, and I liked best what he said over and over: “Nothing is worth it.” he was a sage.

it felt good like screaming in a madhouse, the madhouse of my world as the mice scattered among the empties.

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

—those poor darlings had no idea… and neither did I that those ugly roaring nights would be fodder such as even Dostoevski would not shy away from.

I got so god damned thin that if I turned sidewise it was hard to see my shadow under a hard noon sun. it didn’t matter to me so long as I stayed away from the crowd and even down there it was a successful and an unsuccessful crowd. I don’t think I was insane but many of the insane think that

if anything saved me it was the avoidance of the crowd it was my food still is. get me in a room with more than 3 people I tend to act ill odd.