Edited by John Martin
These poems are part of an archive of unpublished work that Charles Bukowski left to be published after his death.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to John Martin, who edited these poems.
contents
I live near the
slaughterhouse
and am ill
with thriving.
come on in!
nothing but a scarf
literary chitchat
this machine is a fountain
200 years
residue
Coronado Street: 1954
a vision
cut-rate drugstore: 4:30 p.m.
you can’t tell a turkey by its feathers
too early!
the green Cadillac
I’m not all-knowing but …
in the clubhouse
a famished orphan sits somewhere in the mind
form letter
first family
a real thing, a good woman
a child’s bedtime story
working out in Hades
half-a-goldfish
lousy mail
from the Dept. of English
and poems have too
poets to the rescue
red hot mail
some personal thoughts
he’s a dog
tremor
my Mexican buddy
strangers at the racetrack
will you tiptoe through the tulips with me?
the novel life
thanks for your help
I have continued regardless
balloons
moving toward the dark
the real thing
she looked at me and asked,
did you?
did you?
did you?
on the cuff
alone again
fooling Marie (the poem)
the copulation blues
the faithful wife
once in a while
another high-roller
the fucking horses
hello there!
the fuck-master
my personal psychologist
jealousy
her guy
dead poet’s wife
scrambled legs
endless love
down and out on the boardwalk
sex sister
to the ladies no longer here
the nude dancer
Ma Barker loves me
here we go again
do you believe that a man can be taught to write?
hail and farewell
weep
it’s a lonely world
of frightened people.
a note upon modern poesy
the end of an era
Paris in the spring
alone in this chair
talking about the poets
was Li Po wrong?
operator
a note from Hades in the mailbox
on the sunny banks of the university
vacation in Greece
the spill
the last salamander
learning the ropes
bombed away
the swimming pool will be going here
a bright boy
my turn
skinny-dipping
a close call
like a rock
the waitress at the yogurt shop
one out in the minor leagues
the little girls hissed
I dreamt
the old couple next door
men without women
the “Beats”
hurry slowly
hello and goodbye
I will never have
a house in the valley
with little stone men
on the lawn.
don’t call me, I’ll call you
taking the 8 count
going going gone
this is where they come for what’s left of your soul
hot night
the x-bum
something cares
my cats
6:30 a.m.
what I need
gender benders
after many nights
good morning, how are you?
a reader of my work
Sumatra Cum Laude
the disease of existence
another comeback
two nights before my 72nd birthday
have we come to this?
old poem
older
closing time
no leaders, please
everything hurts
husk
my song
cancer
blue
twilight musings
mind and heart
COME ON IN!
I live near the
slaughterhouse
and am ill
with thriving.
come on in!
welcome to my wormy hell.
the music grinds off-key.
fish eyes watch from the wall.
this is where the last happy shot was
fired.
the mind snaps closed
like a mind snapping
closed.
we need to discover a new will and a new
way.
we’re stuck here now
listening to the laughter of the
gods.
my temples ache with the fact of
the facts.
I get up, move about, scratch
myself.
I’m a pawn.
I am a hungry prayer.
my wormy hell welcomes you.
hello. hello there. come in, come on in!
plenty of room here for us all,
sucker.
we can only blame ourselves so
come sit with me in the dark.
it’s half-past
nowhere
everywhere.
nothing but a scarf
long ago, oh so long ago, when
I was trying to write short stories
and there was one little magazine which printed
decent stuff
and the lady editor there usually sent me
encouraging rejection slips
so I made a point to
read her monthly magazine in the public
library.
I noticed that she began to feature
the same writer
for the lead story each
month and
it pissed me off because I thought that I could
write better than that
fellow.
his work was facile and bright but it had no
edge.
you could tell that he had never had his nose rubbed into
life, he had just
glided over it.
next thing I knew, this ice-skater-of-a-writer was
famous.
he had begun as a copy boy
on one of the big New York
magazines
(how the hell do you get one of those
jobs?)
then he began appearing in some of the best
ladies’ magazines
and in some of the respected literary
journals.
then after a couple of early books
out came a little volume, a sweet
novelette, and he was truly
famous.
it was a tale about high society and
a young girl and it was
delightful and charming and just a bit
naughty.
Hollywood quickly made a movie out of
it.
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then the writer bounced around Hollywood
from party to party
for a few years.
I saw his photo again and again:
a little elf-man with huge
eyeglasses.
and he always wore a long dramatic
scarf.
but soon he went back to New York and to all the
parties there.
he went to every important party thereafter for years
and to
some that weren’t very
important.
then he stopped writing altogether and just went
to parties.
he drank or doped himself into oblivion almost
every night.
his once slim frame more than doubled in
size.
his face grew heavy and he no longer looked
like the young boy with the quick and dirty
wit but more like an
old frog.
the scarf was still on display but his hats were
too large and came down almost to his
eyes;
all you noticed was his
twisted
lurid
grin.
the society ladies still liked to drag him
around New York
one on each arm
and
drinking like he did, he didn’t live
to enjoy his old age.
so
he died
and was quickly
forgotten
until somebody found what they claimed was his secret
diary / novel
and then all the famous people in
New York were very
worried
and they should have been worried because when it
was published
out came all the dirty
laundry.
but I still maintain that he never really did know how to
write; just what and
when and about
whom.
slim, thin
stuff.
ever so long ago, after reading
one of his short stories,
after dropping the magazine to the floor,
I thought,
Jesus Christ, if this is what they
want,
from now on
I might as well write for
the rats and the spiders
and the air and just for
myself.
which, of course, is exactly what
I did.
literary chitchat
my friend Tom, he liked to come over
and he’d say, “let’s go get a coffee.”
and my girlfriend would say, “you guys
going to talk that literary stuff again?”
and we’d go to this place where you paid
for your first coffee and all the refills were
free
and we’d get a seat by the window and he
would begin:
Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos
Passos mainly but others got in there
too: e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, Dreiser,
Jeffers, Céline and so forth.
although I will admit I was mostly a
listener and wondered what he was
really getting at, if anything, I
continued to listen and
drink coffee after
coffee.
once he said, “look, I’ll take you to the
place Fitzgerald stayed at for a while
during his Hollywood period.”
“all right,” I said and we got into his
car and he drove me there and pointed
it out:
“Fitzgerald lived there.”
“all right,” I said and then he drove us
back for more coffee.
Tom was truly excited about these
literary figures of the past.
I was too, to an extent,
but as Tom talked on and on about
them
and the coffees continued unabated
my interest began to wane, more than
wane.
I began to want to get rid of
Tom.
it was easy.
one day I wrote a poem about Tom
and it was published and he read
it
and after that
we enjoyed no more coffees
together.
Tom had been working on a
biography of me
and that ended that.
then another writer came along
and he drank my wine
and didn’t talk about Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Faulkner, etc.,
he talked about himself
and ended up writing a not-very-
satisfactory biography
of me.
I should have stuck with Tom.
no, I should have gotten rid of
both of them.
which is exactly what I have
done.
this machine is a fountain
my system is always the same:
keep it loose
write a great number of
poems
try with all your
heart and
don’t worry about the
bad
ones.
keep it going
keep it
hot
forget about immortality
if you ever
remembered
it.
the sound of this machine is
good.
much paper
more desire.
just
hammer away and wait for lady
luck.
what a
bargain.
200 years
hunched over this white sheet of paper
at 4 in the afternoon. I
received a letter from a young poet this morning
informing me that I was one of the most
important writers of the last
200 years.
well, now, one can’t believe that
especially if one has felt as I have
this past month,
walking about,
thinking,
surely I am going crazy,
and then thinking,
I can’t write
anymore.
and then I remember the factories,
the production lines,
the warehouses,
the time clocks,
overtime and layoffs
and flirtations with the Mexican girls
on the assembly line;
each day everything was carefully planned,
there was always something to do,
there was more than enough to do,
and if you didn’t keep up,
if you weren’t clever and swift and
obedient
you were out with the sparrows and
the bums.
writing’s different, you’re floating out there in the
white air, you’re hanging from the high-wire,
you’re sitting up in a tree and they’re working at
the trunk with a power
saw …
there’s no silk scarf about one’s neck,
no English accent,
no remittance checks from aristocratic ladies in Europe
with blind and impotent
husbands.
it’s more like a fast hockey game
or putting on the gloves with a man
50 pounds heavier and ten years
younger, or
it’s like steering a ship through the fog
with a mad damsel clinging to your
neck
a
nd all along you know you’ve gotten away
with some quite obvious stuff, that
you’ve been given undeserved credit, for stuff
that you either wrote offhand or
hardly meant or hardly cared
about.
well, it helps to be
lucky.
yet, on the other hand, you have sometimes
done it as you always knew it should
be done, and you knew then that it was
as good as it could be done,
and that maybe you had done it better,
in a way,
than anybody else had done it for a long time
and
you allowed yourself to feel
good about that
for a moment or
two.
they put the pressure on you
with statements about 200 years,
and when only one individual says it, that’s all
right
but when 2 or 3 or 4 say it—
that’s when they tend to open the door to a
kookoo bin.
they tell you to give up cigarettes and
booze, and then they tell you that you
have 25 more good years ahead of you and
then
perhaps ten more years to enjoy your old
age
as you suck on
the rewards and
memories.
Patchen’s gone, we need you, man,
we all need you for that
good feeling just above the
belly button—
knowing that you are there in some small room in
northern California writing poems and
killing flies with a torn
flyswatter.
they can kill you,
the praisers can kill you,
the young girls can kill you,
as the blue-eyed boys in English depts.
who send warm letters
handwritten
on lined paper
can kill you,
and they’re all correct:
2 packs a day and the bottle
can kill you
too.
of course,
anything can kill you