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.

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

then I went on to city college where the only molesting I could see going on was what they did to your mind.

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

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

I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better.

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.

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.

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

now Death is a plant growing in my mind

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

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

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.

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

I was too drunk to fear the danger

it confused me and I suppose I needed that.

as long as there are human beings about there is never going to be any peace for any individual upon this earth (or anywhere else they might escape to). all you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes here or maybe an hour there.

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

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.

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

I don’t think I was insane but many of the insane think that

only the plants and the animals are true comrades. I drink to them and with them.

there’s fire in the walls and the snails in the garden only want love and there’s fire in the crabgrass we are burning burning burning

most of us so often deteriorate overnight into a state so near defecation that the end result is almost unbearable to the senses.

it happens and happens and continues to: the mutilation of talent the gods seldom give but so quickly take.

what wanton hare-brained impulse makes us floor it with only one hand on the wheel? don’t we realize the peace of aging gently? what hell-call is this to war?

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.