Bukowski no. 28

In Kenya they are going to destroy the ivory from four thousand elephants.
I saw a woman today so beautiful that she took the breath from my lungs
and tread it underfoot.

She kept seeing me looking at her and she laughed at me a little
and blushed a little but goddamn you should have seen her.

Tusks of ivory are the last thing that an elephant can give and beauty
is one of the first things a woman can give,
but like an elephant women sometimes do not know the price that people will pay.

I did not want to buy her or have her, or anything as coarse as that,
but I kept seeing her, with her eyes blue like the sky before sunrise—
blue like the whales that always are dying or the color of a flag,
blue like the cresting curving waves of an ocean that I have never seen.

Her hair coiled around her ears and again by her cheekbones
and she blushed when she saw all of us staring.
It is a lovely thing to be able to blush when you know why blood runs hot.

As I left for the night I passed close by her and I felt as if she were a snake full of venom-
her body moved so close to mine in a doorway that I was poisoned or intoxicated-
but then the spell was broken and she said goodbye and I said goodbye.

It seems unnecessary for women to be so pretty.
I’d fall in love with them anyway.

A History of Madness 10

I said,
“I went looking for you in the winesinks and in the bars with sawdust floors—
You were not there.”

I said,
“I went looking for you in the whorehouses,
where the women have the names of gemstones
but their eyes are dull and dead—
You were not there.”

I said,
“I went looking for you in the jailhouse and the gutters,
where I kicked over a hundred bums looking for a tattoo as evil as yours,
a blade carved deep with runes that told of devouring hate and desire—
You were not there.”

When I found you floating by the river
your lips were purple like the toga of a god
and the back of your head where the bullet made its exit
dripped slow crimson tears into the water
and you told me many things and afterward I let you drift away.

Prehistory

For many years I have been trying to explain how it feels to live without a sense of smell. On the surface it is the most meaningless debilitation, though throughout life it can become the most pernicious. We have a concept of what it would be like to Not See. What does it mean to Not Smell?

Perhaps the distress that some feel when enduring a minor illness is the loss of one of their senses more than the replication of bacteria in their blood. They recover from this loss of connection quickly, as though they had been sick and then recovered. Probably they do not think of that experience again.

When endured constantly, the erosion of a sensory deprivation sinks in. There is the loss of the scent of honeysuckle, of women, of  bacon spitting grease on a stovetop, of toothpaste— little by little everything is taken. Connections to memory and minor events of the past gradually wither without this reinforcement. The experience of any new thing fails because nothing smells like anything. There is no potential for angels or misery, only blankness, only the way dust must smell.

But what does a blind man know of sunsets?

Concerning Metaphors

I was conscious that I was destroying myself

but I did not know how to care.

I would get hypnotically lost in a song

or the way my right wrist hurts when I wake up,

that’s how I would get away if I could.

I kept reading Marquez or Hemingway as if I would learn something new.

The blade of my survival knife rusted where I held it in my mouth,

because I did not ever clean it afterwards.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be a pirate, but I wanted to see what happened.

And now on the blade there are these halfmoons of my lips.

The knife is more durable than most things I own, and what story does it tell?

I do not know. The water washed most things away

but tomorrow my wrist will hurt.

Carmen 50

We were listening to American Beauty
and she was dancing the way that women can,
with her hands over her head and her wrists twisting,
and her hips pushing her dress around and her feet making slow circles
while I talked at length about one of the plays of Euripides.

I did not know why I was talking and her hair was spinning
with her body and shadows made storms on the pine floor
and something about the way her ankle looked in the pale light
made me shut up for a second.
She stopped dancing and looked at me curiously.
She knelt to the floor so that her eyes were level with mine and said,
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you dead?”

Carmen 49

I don’t feel alive so I try to smoke cigarettes;
they work for my brothers but I want something more,
so I blow smoke towards the door.

Long Virginia Slims, they call them one-twenties,
what fate in this world could lead them to my hand?
What could help me understand?

I went back in time and I went to a restaurant,
the bread was fresh and the service was superb
but we left without a word.

You tore me back through our door and took my clothes off.
I wanted you, you were like a summer day.
I hoped you’d never go away.

I wrote a bad poem and you laughed at me
and kissed me anyway.
You didn’t like rhymes.