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.

red Mercedes

we’ve got the power of sanity here.

the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

no help for that

my mother walked along beside me. she wasn’t anything at all. and I had a bellyache and even the trees we walked under seemed less than trees and more like everything else.

outside, the traffic runs up and down, down and up, going nowhere.

darkness

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

January

sunny side down

well, that’s just the way it is…

“nothing matters and we know nothing matters and that matters…”

my friend, the parking lot attendant

miracle

let the dying die as they always have.

my first affair with that older woman

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

Wow

nerves: large crowds of people more than unsettle me.

most of the people in the world could care less and I often feel the same way.

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.

now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.

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

not much to hang on to as a man plays a piano through my radio and the walls stand up and down as the courage of everything even the fleas the lice the tarantula astounds me in this early morning growling.

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

Glenn Miller

she wasn’t very interesting but few people are.

just being dead would be fair enough.

sometimes it’s hard to know what to do.

it seemed less real, and that was what was needed.

about the PEN conference

me and my buddy

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

“Nothing is worth it.”

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

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

the world is better without them. only the plants and the animals are true comrades.

fractional note

we are all burning together burning brothers and sisters I like it I like it I like it.

I love you but don’t know what to do.

as if that would stop the way fruit trees drop their fruit or the ocean brings in the coni and the dead spores of the Grecian Empire

our laughter is muted by their agony

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

it’s ours