Bukowski no. 27

I worked all day today and I thought I would have something to say,
but after the indignity of the day I have nothing left.
I hope I will die soon.

Bukowski no. 26

Class is not what separates us. We are severed by the ability to hope. Why else should some live in dreams and others in nightmares? Surely we are not playing dice with our lives although it must seem so to an observer. They would look at me and say, “How coarse! He sleeps on a floor, he spends his money on drugs and sleeping pills and coffee, he does not even keep his knife sharp.” And they are not wrong, but they ignore the elemental truth and pain of it, the books that course through my veins like septic blood, the songs cascading fresh from choirs of fallen seraphim. We are all pure here, in the shadow of the moon.

Bukowski no. 25

She walks in forests with a knife on her hip
and lays a son to bed at night.
I fall asleep on the floor of my apartment
and spit out bloodied rotten shards of my teeth into the sink.

Once we were laying together and I looked at her
and brushed her hair away from her eyes and told her
that she would have everything she ever wanted.
She looked at me and told me that I would, too.

A History of Madness 9

The actions of man are as easily explained as the vagaries of the weather.
Any account of a moment or a life is necessarily colored
by the one who is aching out their remembrance so that we may understand.
Who benefits from these exchanges?
People are either capable of telling the truth or they are not.
We must believe that all the souls of humanity are not base liars,
But who among us has not recalled in detail a conversation that never took place
or a childhood summer spent on the shores of a lake that cannot be found on a map?
It may be that time is changing behind us, and that all our stories were once true.

Bukowski no. 24

She lifted her head off of my collarbone and said

“These are the days I could think I loved you.”

I shouldered her away and sat up in my bed

immodest as the day I was born.

Faint light clawed at the room from behind the blinds

and my legs shook up and down so that my heels bounced off the floor.

I focused on breathing: inhale four seconds, exhale eight-

I counted the tetrads as if I had learned meditation from a monk

and not an essay I skimmed over long ago.

I must have been looking toward the carpet for some time

but when I turned toward her she had not disappeared.

She was looking through me and I told her

she was something I could find in any book and

I was nothing she could not find in any other man and

I would have kept talking but she pressed her finger to my lips

and held me and quickly pretended to be asleep.

From the way her hips curved in the sickled moonlight

I could tell she was sorry to have said anything at all.

Throwing Up Blood in a Southern Town

Let us ignore the beginning and come to a day
when I showed up to work on time and worked for seven hours.

I came home to find that some of my countrymen had been murdered—
I could write this sentence every day and be truthful, and I think about this.

I went to the liquor store and I bought some.
I went back home and played video games for hours with my friends,
drinking a beer about every thirty minutes.
One of them went home and one of them went to sleep
and I had given three of my beers away and drank the rest
and I was out of weed so I didn’t feel like sleeping.

My friend’s girl had a bottle of some cheap white wine I would never buy,
and I sat waiting for the sun to come up and drank her Moscato
and afterward I opened the freezer and found the gin there
so I drank everything that was left in that bottle too.

The sun was up but I didn’t greet it or care much
and I was sitting in a corner narrowing my eyebrows at the world
and thinking about the last bottle of wine.

It was black wine
and I had bought it because the label looked like a metal album’s artwork
and it had a cork in it and the apartment’s corkscrew had broken a few days before
so I got a hammer and took the bottle onto the balcony.

I looked at my face’s reflection,
then put the bottle into a 2.5 gallon bucket.
I shielded my eyes with a towel and swung at the bottle as if it held my past

and I only knocked off the cork
and some of the upper curves were jagged like the mouth of hell
and I smiled.

I filtered the glass through my teeth and felt sorry for myself, or something.

I know that many things occurred afterward but the next that I recall
occurred in a bed and room that was not my own.
She leaned over me and said “You need to sleep, I’ll be back later”
and gave me a hug and she left and no one had been so close to me in months.

I spent hours there in my delirium, sweating out salt and poison,
trying my best to drink the ice water that sat on an end table an eternity away.

Suddenly I felt uncomfortable and raced to the bathroom,
vomiting water and salivary amylase and acid and bubbles
and eventually blood that looked like coffee grounds.
For the next four hours I tried to drink small bits of water,
only to reject it with the same bloody message each time.

Usually when you throw up blood people will insist on going to an emergency room,
and of course I should have gone, but I have never liked doctors much
and I did not think I would die on a Sunday so I managed to sleep through that morning
on the floor rather than one of those uncomfortable hospital beds.

This is not a poem and it is not much of a story and it does not have a point
and almost all of it happened to me because I didn’t care about myself
and I still don’t.

I carry all this pain around. I don’t even know why I have it. Other people have told me to give it away, as if it was money or a child I stopped caring about, but no one makes gifts of priceless things. No one else has ever tasted pain as exquisite as mine. When they pry my heart out they will be searching for diamonds.

The next day, after I stopped shivering, I cleaned off the hammer
and bought a corkscrew.

I Loved Her

They lock the door on their room when they are going to start fucking
and I am grateful a little since I won’t have to walk in
but I never walked in and I don’t want to see their room
so I don’t know why they locked the door but they did.

I loved them some but I hated everyone and I drank as much as I could
and I’d drink shots of gin and throw them up into the toilet
and then drink more because that is the kind of man I am.

They locked their door and maybe they were happy
and maybe they made love
but probably
by five fucking thirty three in the morning they were tired
and there was no one left awake but me.

Yob Tvoyu Mat

What are you going to do with yourself? The question is necessary after a while.
You are poor, you have no prospects, all you have is an amateur education in literature and the ability to say "fuck your mother" in Russian with an atrocious accent.
In this country a man may buy ten or twenty pounds of potatoes for five dollars or a badly made knife for five dollars or a badly made meal for five dollars or he can sell his soul and get a little more. I never knew hate even when I looked into my father, but any hell would have been mine if I could see my own green eyes. In the depths of a cliche I took my mirrors down so that I would not have to see him anymore. I am in every pool of water and I curse the rain when my face splashes by the roadside.

Get Thee To

The tragedy of Ophelia is simpler than that of her love,
because she had no fucking clue what was happening.

Did Hamlet love her?
Once. Perhaps. At least that was his claim.
But he pretended to love her because it was useful-
she never understood that.
He killed her father because Polonius was in the wrong place.
She could have been Odysseus but instead she was Ophelia.

So she dies. And why?
All over a misunderstanding,
Because she was the most convenient woman that he could claim he loved.
He did not want her to die but he did not think about her much
and somewhere between the flowers and the water she knew that—
but trapped on earth with a dead father and a living madman of a prince
she chose the river and it took her home.

Hamlet felt regret for this, or at least that was the lie he told.
Who truly can say what a man feels about a women he has discarded?

He Will Give

I began living in this apartment and immediately wondered when I’d be kicked out. I paid my rent and didn’t stomp very much but I had roommates and it is difficult to predict when someone will begin to hate you. We talked about dying many times but I guess I didn’t take it seriously. We had romantic desires to perish at twenty-seven but I outlived it and I thought he would too. I am laying on the stretch of the carpet where I sleep and it’s the kind of carpet that gets very dark when rubbed one way and very light when rubbed the other so that you can never tell if it is dirty. I had to work when his body was to be visited but I would not have gone anyway. He didn’t like people that were too sentimental. In his obituary they had printed the sentence: “He was a telemarketer.” but he wasn’t, that was just what he did for a living, just that same as I did those three years we knew each other, and those nights of him riding a bike through a college town selling god-knows-what— that was what he did too and a lot of people called him a criminal and of course he was but he was a good person and he was my friend and eventually we all get killed by this goddamn world that wakes up every morning and never lets us hide. He cared about philosophy and literature and music and they called him a telemarketer. What will they call me?

A History of Madness 8

Once I was proud of the things I had learned.

Any moment could remind me of another—

Ivan Grozny murdering his son could be evoked

by drinking vodka on a cold and rainy day,

the phantasms of summer evening were more terrible still

and arose of their own accord,

and any woman could be brought to life

through the touch of a different woman.

Memory is not an insurmountable thing,

but most times we are not willing

to make enough fire to entirely burn our library.

We are left with husks:

proper nouns

the shading of green in a lover’s eyes

the words she says when she is asleep.

Nearly everything is dying again.

I have been waiting for winter all year

but it does not satisfy me.

I loved a woman once and she lives on

like the pine trees that are planted

to hide a forest that has just been cut down.

Bukowski no. 23

She was so angry that she nearly had as much hate as comes through my windows with the morning sun. “How could you?” she kept saying, over and over until it began to bore me so I answered her. —Fuck if I know. I mean, I get it, sometimes I punch strangers in the face or give half my money away when rent is due. Sometimes I get arrested or jump a bus to a different state for a while or show up to work as drunk as anyone has ever been, and I know people are not supposed to make these mistakes. But some mornings you wake up and all you think about is the .38 Special revolver you buried in a safe on the northeast corner of the white oak fifty paces past the drainage ditch near mile marker nineteen. You get fired or you don’t. You get evicted or you don’t. When the choice arrives between tomorrow and today you choose today.

Bukowski no. 22

It was past last call but the bartender was still serving me,
either because I tipped well or because she liked my company.
I was having a vaguely academic discussion about drugs
with a woman who wore a string of pearls across her forehead
in imitation of a long-discarded style.
I do not think the pearls were real but I have been wrong before.

She was asking me questions I knew the answers to,
and I was fond of her because of it.

The conversation shifted to be about her life, which she spoke of
for a minute or two before suddenly asking me
“Have you ever been in love?”
as I lifted up a glass of whiskey and twisted it in the light.

If a car had been on fire in the parking lot
I would not have been able to look away.
I ordered four more whiskeys and I told her
“yes”
and the next morning I walked the three miles to work
and before I tried to sell anything over the phone
I went to a vending machine to buy a Sprite
and the next thing I knew my cheek was on the cool tile
and I saw the world like a mouse would.
I checked to make sure I wasn’t bleeding and I wasn’t
and soon people rushed over to me.
Someone took me home so that they wouldn’t have to fire me
and as soon as the bar opened at three in the afternoon
I went there again.

A History of Madness 7

I stood on a slab of concrete
killing ants.

When I was a younger man I knew their Latin name,
I could define their mandibles and thoraxes
but now I crush them
by the hundred beneath my heel.

I believe, though I do not know why,
that their dying sends a chemical signal to the others.
I see them shy away from a fallen friend,
but what does an ant know of death
and why should it be feared?

There were two carrying a corpse larger than they were,
the others scurried past them but they walked crab-legged
across the concrete slab without getting anywhere.
I chose one and smashed him right through the brain.
The other struggled, unaware that his comrade had died—
he carried the worm first one way and then the other,
he tangled it in the fallen leaves, he abandoned it
but none of the other hundreds took up that burden.
He waited for about fourteen seconds then walked along the line the other ants had made.

I watched him, my eyes focused on his black armor,
and I thought of her
so small against my chest,
her black hair flowing all around
while the devil told me his daughter’s name.

I let the ant go into the hive after he tore up a piece of a butterfly
and placed it in his jaws before beginning the long walk home.
I will kill him tomorrow.

Magicicada

She watched her father at the bar. She was about fourteen and already knew more about men than anyone could teach her. He does not talk to the women but he’ll talk to anyone else. Two boys are on the bar-stools beside her, but they do not stare at his glass of beer like she does, they do not count the refills with growing dread. Still she was not broken, only bored. Years later I was reading certain short stories of Guy de Maupassant until the barmaid mentioned that she had never read him. I wrote my name and address inside the book’s cover and handed it over. I paid my bill and said to her “Never let a man tell you that you are a pearl.” She did not understand and I did not understand and I walked home and went to sleep while the thirteen-year cicadas screamed into the night.

Bukowski no. 21

Not so long ago, my brother’s truck had a handful of fluid leaks, sometimes it wouldn’t start up, and one of the speakers wouldn’t work unless you punched the dashboard pretty hard and even then you’d only get stereo sound for a few minutes before it cut out again.

One day I asked him why he did not take the truck to a mechanic, and he replied 

“What good would that do? I’d pay someone to tell me that a long list of things were wrong, and that they could fix it if I had more money than I have.”
I laughed and mentioned that I had used the same rationale to avoid doctors, dentists, and therapists for the last five years.

Though I am not qualified to make this judgement, I think one of my wisdom teeth is dying. It does not feel the way that it once did and when I look (carefully in mirrors while pulling my cheek out of the way) it appears quite different from every other tooth in my skull. I suppose I will ignore the goddamn thing until the pain becomes unbearable—then I’ll pull it out with a pair of needlenose pliers.

A History of Madness 6

The present controls the accuracy of memory

more than the past ever could.

Often, in some shitty sports bar or cup of coffee

I have tried to summon the ghosts that kiss me to sleep at night.

Who knows what lies I have whispered to those shadows and plumes of steam?

I find that I feel guilty for any injustice that could be imagined,

even if it existed in fiction. The mere names of countries can fill me with dread,

knowing that at any moment my brain will begin a demonic litany:

Years, numbers of the slain, names of villages that are no longer villages.

And why should I bear the hate of mankind

upon my shoulders as if they were broad enough to hold it all?

I do not mean to suggest that I identify with the victims or their families.

I do not believe that I am capable of any such emotions,

but many times I have worn the bloody boots of monsters as I drift through sleep.

When I created the world I never meant for any of this to happen.

A History of Madness 5

A History of Madness 5 is spurious.

A History of Madness 4

I could hear the wine pouring through the phone into her glass
and she said

“I want a baby. Did you know babies can learn in the womb?
Isn’t that beautiful? They would learn so much from me
and if it didn’t turn out well
I could just give it up for adoption.”

And I laughed in the terrible way that I know and later
she said “I don’t even think you can be sweet to a woman,”
and I said “I can be,”
and she asked me how, so I told her
that I am half-decent at giving massages
and don’t mind giving my money away
and that I know how to brush hair and make breakfast and get water
and hold someone when their cramps start up
and I told her I wasn’t really such a bad guy as I pretended to be
and then I started crying or maybe I was crying all along.

Later she explained to me that she did not want to date me or fuck me
and all I could think to say was “Man, I never asked you.”

A History of Madness 3

Her hair was black and her lips were red
and she drank a different beer than I was drinking.

We were at the Mexican restaurant close to my apartment
where Happy Hour started at about one in the afternoon,
and at the table she sat across from me and I looked at her
and she was beautiful
and her boyfriend was there too and he was loudly talking
about something but I was not listening
because I had a tall beer the color of amber, without an orange,
and I could pay for it.

After a little while I had to take a piss so I wordlessly stood
and walked toward the bathroom. 

Before you walked right or left for a door they had these miniature saloon doors,
slatted like window shutters, and I opened them and heard footsteps
so I stood to the side
and then her tongue was in my mouth and she was pushing me against the wall
and before I knew it I could breathe.

I said “Are you trying to get me killed?” and she kissed me again
and my desire was careless so I lifted her off the ground
and her arms were around my neck and she was a flood I could not stop
and I tasted the light beer she was drinking and her lips were red
and then there was a sound

so I put her down and quickly went into the bathroom and locked the door
and said “Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ”
although I never believed in Him
and took a piss and washed my hands and by the time I got to the table
she was sitting there by her boyfriend
so I looked over at Mariano and raised my finger so he would know
that I needed another beer.

A History of Madness 2

The hickory nut fell down as green as the wind isn’t,
taking four dried leaves and another nut (entirely closed) down to closely cut grass.

The leaves fluttered slowly in the air
as if they were dancing
and knew they would never dance again.

The two fallen seeds began a conversation.
The younger was livid and screaming “My mother loves me and you took me from her!”
The other smiled where his skin was beginning to split and said
“My brother, she was always going to drop you.
Perhaps you are too young to fall. Maybe you will rot here on the ground,
Maybe the monsters with long teeth and thick tails will spirit you away
and bury you in a secret place, only to eat you when the world is cold.

But this is how we become a tree someday and many of us die,
and maybe it will be you because I made you fall too early
and for that I am sorry
although you would probably have died anyway.”

The younger thought about this for a moment and suddenly a wizened old man
raked them both up and the four leaves too and put them all on the burnpile.

A History of Madness 1

No one else in the world was breathing and there was no light

and only the sound of a second-hand window air conditioner

or the clang of a furnace turning on or off.

Depersonalization is one of the benefits of solitude as you approach sleep.

Only in the darkness can you forget who you are

and pretend that you will not wake the next day to the tedium of life.

almost you disappear but there is still something left,

the taste of a cigarette

the sound a hat did not make as it fell to the ground

skipping a day like a rock on a lake in the rain

but you will always wake up

and you will never be free

Bukowski no. 20

Eric has been my friend for a long time but I’m not sure if we ever have liked each other much.

“Listen,” he said over the noise from the bar. “I know someone and told her all about you, and she really wants to meet you.”

“First off, the answer is no. Also, what exactly is wrong with her, and why the hell are you always trying to set me up with women?”

He furrowed his eyebrows in concentration and looked at his nearly empty glass of rum. “There’s nothing wrong with her, you’d like her. Never been married, mentions art and all that shit in random conversation all the time, doesn’t believe in God or the Republican Party. Has a job. Reads books.”

He drank the rest of his rum and the ice hit his teeth.

He said “Oh, and I try to set you up with women because every time you drink you damn near cry about how goddamn lonely you are or at least you won’t shut up about it for an hour or two.”

I had just gotten a fresh glass of beer and I stared at it. I could tell you how it looked but it was like every other pint of beer in the world.

I said “Get fucked, man. Sometimes I think you hate them. Not exactly, uh, responsible human behavior. Kinda like telling someone to roll around in poison ivy for a while, you know?”

“Well sue me for trying to do a friend a favor. You should meet her though. You’d like her. Her name is Athena, I’ll give you her number. Hell you have that weekly rant where you say that, how do you phrase it? ‘The aspects of the divine are constantly among us, but we do not notice,’ is that it? You give speeches more than anyone I know, I’m just saying. You can’t pass up someone named for a goddess without giving her a shot.”

I laughed.

“I don’t want a goddess. They’re dangerous. I don’t want any of these good women that you periodically try to condemn to me, either. I had good women before and it didn’t turn out so well for them. I want broken women- drug addict waitresses who make three grand a month and never have money, drunks that fuck fifty men and sixty women a year, the ones with razorblade scars on their thighs and hearts, the ones-”

"Jesus!" he broke in, "Why are you so motherfucking lonely then? You know thirty of those women already."

He shook his head, stood, and walked away to get the attention of the nearest bartender.

I looked at my beer again and softly said

"Yeah, but they all throw their cigarette butts on the ground."

Bukowski no. 19

I knew about all sorts of recent happenings that now held no interest to me.
As a younger man I would have talked all about them to anyone who'd listen-
The flag of the United States had been raised in Havana after decades of tension,
a century-old gold mine in Colorado had spilled its poison and fish were dying,
archaeologists found the gate to the ancient city of Gath where once mighty Goliath grew,
legions of innocents died yearly across the globe to famine and violence-
these were the things I knew.

I didn't know how to make my mother proud of me,
or how to stop reading Hamlet all the goddamn time.

The world will drown you if you let it and sometimes even if you can swim
you will drown anyway because the ocean is a woman and the earth is a woman.
She kills us because she cannot tell the difference between her children
and the demons that destroy her but even if she could tell the difference
there is no guarantee that she would give a damn.

Bukowski no. 18

But I guess that was what life was

you collect blue jay feathers when you can

and the woman you love goes home at night to another man

and you end up knee deep in vodka nearly sleeping

next to a woman you do not love in a recliner and she says

I like to feel your arms around me

don’t let go darling

and you say

I won’t darling don’t worry

I won’t

Bukowski no. 17

In the paper

they said

they were gonna kill two million feral cats

in Australia.

I wonder when they will come for me.

Bukowski no. 16

You told me
"You spend too much time reading while Reading.
Not writing or living."

Good lines. Should have written them but I didn't.
I was reading polemic Byzantine history at the bar
and feeling disgusted by the way my life turned out.
But who writes of things like that? No one. It is not
respectable.

I am home again now. Still not writing or living.
A wheel on the lawn-mower broke today and I will have to replace it
tomorrow.

You sold several paintings and I am glad of it
maybe one day you will make one a gift to me
and after you are famous and dead
I will sell it
and buy another beer.