Come on In! - Charles Bukowski [4]
much longer.
but look at you, you just sit around in your room
all day! other
boys have jobs, paper routes, Jim Stover works
as an usher at the
Bayou!
HOW IN THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO
SURVIVE IN THIS
WORLD?
I don’t
know …
you make me SICK! sometimes, having a son like
you, I wish I was
dead.
well, he did die, he died more than 30 years
ago.
and last year I paid
$59,000 income
tax.
too early!
there are some people who will
phone a man at 7 a.m.
when he is desperately sick and
hungover.
I always greet
these idiots
with a few violent
words
and the slamming
down of the
receiver
knowing that their
morning eagerness
means that
they retired early
and thus wasted the
preceding
night
(and most likely
the preceding days, weeks and
years).
that they could
imagine
that
I’d want to
converse with
them
at 7 a.m.
is an insult
to
whatever
intelligent life
is left
in our dwindling
universe.
the green Cadillac
he hung the green Cadillac
almost straight up and down
standing on its nose
against the phone pole
next to the
All-American Hamburger
Hut.
I was
in the laundromat
with my girlfriend when
we heard the sound of it.
when we got there
the driver had
dropped out of the car
and run off.
and there was the
green Caddy
standing straight
up and down
against
the phone pole.
it was one of the most
magnificent sights
I had seen
in years:
in the 9 p.m. moonlight
it just stood there—
the people gathered
the people stood back
knowing the Caddy
could come crashing down
at any moment
but it didn’t
it just stood there
straight as an arrow
alongside
the phone pole.
how the hell
they were going to get
that down
without wrecking it
was beyond me.
my girlfriend wanted to
wait and see how
they did it
but we hadn’t
had dinner
yet
and I
talked her into
going back into the
laundromat and then
back to my place.
I was not
mechanically inclined
and it pissed
me off
to watch people
who were.
anyhow
about noon
the next day
when I went out to
buy a newspaper
the green Caddy
was gone.
there was just
an old bum
at the counter
in the All-American
having a coffee
but I had already seen
the real miracle
and I
walked back to
my place
satisfied.
I’m not all-knowing but …
one of the problems is
that when most people
sit down to write a poem
they think,
“now I am going to write a
poem”
and then
they go on to write a poem
that
sounds like a poem
or what they think
a poem should sound like.
this is one of their
problems.
of course, there are other
problems:
those writers of poems
that sound like poems
think that they then must
go around
reading them
to other people.
this, they say, is done
for status and recognition
(they are careful
not to mention
vanity
or the need for
instantaneous
approbation
from some
sparse, addled
crowd).
the best poems
it seems to me
are written out of
an ultimate
need.
and once the poem is
written,
the only need
after that
is to write
another.
and the silence
of the printed page
is the
best response
to a finished
work.
in decades past
I once warned
some poet-friends
of mine
about the masturbatory
nature of poetry readings
done just
for the applause of
a handful of
idiots.
“isolate yourself and
do your work and if you
must mix, then do it
with those who
have no interest at all
in what you consider
so
important.”
such anger,
such a self-righteous
response
did I receive then
from my poet-friends
that it seemed to me
that I had exactly
proved my
point.
after that,
we all drifted
apart.
and that solved just
one of my
problems
and I suppose
just one of
theirs.
in the clubhouse
he is behind me,
talking to somebody:
“well, I like the 5 horse, he closed well last
time, I like a horse who can close.
but you know, you gotta kinda consider
the 4 and the 12.
the 4 needed his last race and look at
him, he’s reading 40-to-1 now.
the 12’s got a chance too.
and look at the 9, he looks really good,