Ash

“our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners. it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“to the whore who took my poems
some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus:
12 poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I’m not Shakespeare
but sometimes simply
there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“I am the old house With the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning, In which all past is present, all degradation Is unredeemable.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

“this then
will be my destiny:
scrabbling for pennies in dark tiny halls
reading poems I have long since become tired
of. and I used to think
that men who drove buses
or cleaned out latrines
or murdered men in alleys were
fools.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry