Charles Bukowski - The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993

the mockingbird had been following the cat all summer mocking mocking mocking teasing and cocksure; the cat crawled under rockers on porches tail flashing and said something angry to the mockingbird which I didnt understand. yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway with the mockingbird alive in its mouth, wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping, feathers parted like a womans legs, and the bird was no longer mocking, it was asking, it was praying but the cat striding down through centuries would not listen. I saw it crawl under a yellow car with the bird to bargain it to another place. summer was over.

a great white light dawns across the continent as we fawn over our failed traditions, often kill to preserve them or sometimes kill just to kill. the leaders of the past were insufficient, the leaders of the present are unprepared. we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait. it is a waiting without hope, more like a prayer for unmerited grace. it all looks more and more like the same old movie. the actors are different but the plots the same: senseless. we should have known, watching our fathers. we should have known, watching our mothers. they did not know, they too were not prepared to teach. we were too naive to ignore their counsel and now we have embraced their ignorance as our own. we are them, multiplied. we are their unpaid debts. we are bankrupt in money and in spirit. there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the edge and will at any moment tumble down to join the rest of us, the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly corrupt. a great white light dawns across the continent, the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind, as grotesque and ultimately unlivable our 21st century struggles to beborn.

There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks, and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev, says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.

There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks, and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev, says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.

I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are at work. He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear. He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough. Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.) Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale .

She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known. What is it? A love affair? Silly. I cant love a woman. Besides, shes pregnant. I can painta flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed, and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy men drive cars and paint their houses, but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats. Corot.

Recollection of Mortefontaine . Paris, Louvre I must write Kaiser, though I think hes a homosexual. Are you still reading Freud? Page 299. She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I hve time and the dog. About church: the trouble with a mask is it never changes. So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.

So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the wind like the end of a tunnel. He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some segment in the air. It floats about the peoples heads. When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches warmer and more blood-real than the dove. Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross .

Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library . He burned away in sleep.

I have seen an old man around town recently carrying an enormous pack. he uses a walking stick and moves up and down the streets with this pack strapped to his back. I keep seeing him. and hes in a tough districteast Hollywood. they arent going to give him a dry bone in east Hollywood. he is lost. with that pack. on the sidewalk and in the sun. god almighty, old man, I think, throw away that pack. then I drive on, thinking of my own problems. the last time I saw him he was not walking. it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent, the pack still strapped to his back. on north Bronson and hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent, the pack still strapped to his back.

I slowed down to look at his face. I had seen one or two other men in my life with looks on their faces like that. I speeded up and turned on the radio. I knew that look. I would never see him again. then wed fly back, mission completed. wed get everything: convoys, dumps, bridges, people, elephants and all the rest. he told me later, I felt bad about the elephants.

I can see myself now after all these suicide days and nights, being wheeled out of one of those sterile rest homes (of course, this is only if I get famous and lucky) by a subnormal and bored nurse there I am sitting upright in my wheelchair almost blind, eyes rolling backward into the dark part of my skull looking for the mercy of death Isnt it a lovely day, Mr. (uncollected)