Come on In! - Charles Bukowski [33]
it floats around up
there.
I remember my grandmother.
she was old.
a mound of useless flesh
with dead eyes,
and a mind stuffed with,
well, crap.
it made me tired and
discouraged to look
at her.
me, I’m still rare meat,
I’ll make a good meal,
the black dogs of death trail me,
nip at my heels.
tiresome hounds, they never
quit.
when they bring me down
they’ll have something
worthy
of their efforts.
young maidens in far-off
countries will
weep,
and rightfully so.
and hell for me will be something interesting and
new.
closing time
around 2 a.m.
in my small room
after turning off the poem
machine
for now
I continue to light
cigarettes and listen to
Beethoven on the
radio.
I listen with a
strange and lazy
aplomb,
knowing there’s still a poem
or two left to write, and
I feel damn
fine, at long
last,
as once again I
admire the verve and gamble
of this composer
now dead for over 100
years,
who’s younger and wilder
than you are
than I am.
the centuries are sprinkled
with rare magic
with divine creatures
who help us get past the common
and
extraordinary ills
that beset us.
I light the next to last
cigarette
remember all the 2 a.m.’s
of my past,
put out of the bars
at closing time,
put out on the streets
(a ragged band of
solitary lonely
humans
we were)
each walking home
alone.
this is much better: living
where I now
live
and listening to
the reassurance
the kindness
of this unexpected
SYMPHONY OF TRIUMPH:
a new life.
no leaders, please
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don’t swim in the same slough.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself
and
stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
change your tone and shape so often that they can
never
categorize you.
reinvigorate yourself and
accept what is
but only on the terms that you have invented
and reinvented.
be self-taught.
and reinvent your life because you must;
it is your life and
its history
and the present
belong only to
you.
everything hurts
when you get as old as I am you can’t help thinking
about death; you know it’s getting closer with every tick of
your watch: an old fart like me can go in a second,
have a stroke, or cancer, or
etc.
etc.
while the young think about locating a piece of ass
the old think about … death.
still,
age makes you appreciate small things:
like, say, you look at a grapefruit like you never
quite looked at one before, or at a bridge, or at a dog or even
just at the sidewalk, you realize you’ve never really seen them clearly
before.
and all the other things around you suddenly seem … new.
the world is now a flower, though sometimes an ugly
one.
and driving the boulevards, you watch people in their
cars and you think: each of them must finally
die.
it’s strange, isn’t it, that each of them must finally die?
then (I often get lucky) I will forget about death. I will
forget that I am … old.
I will feel 45 again. (I’ve always felt 45, even when
I was 16.)
as somewhere somebody waters a small potted plant,
as a plane crashes with a fierce explosion into a mountain,
as deep in the sea strange creatures move,
the poet remains manacled to his helpless
self.
husk
now I watch other men fight
for money and glory
on television
while I sit on an old couch
in the night
a wife and 5 or 6 cats
nearby.
now I sit and watch other men fight
for money and glory.
hell,
I never fought for money.
maybe I should have
but I was never that good
at it—
only sometimes
brave.
is it too late for a comeback?
a comeback from where?
now I sit and watch other men fight
for money and glory.
I sit with a soda and 3 fig bars
as the world curls and goes up in
flame around
me.
my song
ample
consternation,
plentiful
pain
restless days
and
sleepless
nights
always fighting
with all your
heart and soul
so as not
to fail at
living.
who could ask
for anything
more?
cancer
half-past nowhere
alone
in the crumbling
tower