Love Is a Dog From Hell_ Poems, 1974-1977 - Charles Bukowski [10]
Vallejo writing about
loneliness while starving to
death;
Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a
whore;
Rimbaud running off to Africa
to look for gold and finding
an incurable case of syphilis;
Beethoven gone deaf;
Pound dragged through the streets
in a cage;
Chatterton taking rat poison;
Hemingway’s brains dropping into
the orange juice;
Pascal cutting his wrists
in the bathtub;
Artaud locked up with the mad;
Dostoevsky stood up against a wall;
Crane jumping into a boat propeller;
Lorca shot in the road by Spanish
troops;
Berryman jumping off a bridge;
Burroughs shooting his wife;
Mailer knifing his.
—that’s what they want:
a God damned show
a lit billboard
in the middle of hell.
that’s what they want,
that bunch of
dull
inarticulate
safe
dreary
admirers of
carnivals.
Iron Mike
we talk about this film:
Cagney fed this broad
grapefruit
faster than she could
eat it and
then she
loved him.
“that won’t always
work,” I told Iron
Mike.
he grinned and said,
“yeh.”
then he reached down
and touched his belt.
32 female scalps
dangled there.
“me and my big Jewish
cock,” he said.
then he raised his hands
to indicate the
size.
“o, yeh, well,”
I said.
“they come around,” he
said, “I fuck ’em, they
hang around, I tell ’em,
‘it’s time to leave.’”
“you’ve got guts,
Mike.”
“this one wouldn’t leave
so I just got up and
slapped her…she
left.”
“I don’t have your nerve,
Mike. they hang around
washing dishes, rubbing
the shit-stains out of the
crapper, throwing out the
old Racing Forms…”
“they’ll never get me,”
he said,
“I’m invincible.”
look, Mike, no man is
invincible.
some day
you’ll be sent mad by
eyes like a child’s crayon
drawing. you won’t be
able to drink a glass of
water or walk across a
room. there will be the
walls and the sound of
the streets outside, and
you’ll hear machineguns
and mortar shells. that’ll
be when you want it and
can’t have it.
the teeth
are never finally the
teeth of love.
guru
big black beard
tells me
that I don’t feel
terror
I look at him
my gut rattles
gravel
I see his eyes
look upward
he’s strong
has dirty fingernails
and upon the walls:
scabbards.
he knows things:
books
the odds
the best road
home
I like him
but I think he
lies
(I’m not sure
he lies)
his wife sits
in a dark
corner
when I first met
her she was the
most beautiful
woman
I had ever
seen
now she has
become
his twin
perhaps not his
fault:
perhaps the thing
does us all
like that
yet after I leave
their house
I feel terror
the moon looks
diseased
my hands slip
on the
steering wheel
I get my car
out
and down the
hill
almost crash it
into a
blue-green
parked car
clod me forever,
Beatrice
wavering poet, ha
haha
dinky dog of
terror.
the professors
sitting with the professors
we talk about Allen Tate
and John Crow Ransom
the rugs are clean and
the coffeetables shine
and there is talk of
budgets and works in
progress
and there is a
fireplace.
the kitchen floor is
well-waxed
and I have just eaten
dinner
after drinking until
3 a.m.
after reading
the night before
now I’m to read again
at a nearby college.
I’m in Arkansas in
January
somebody even mentions
Faulkner
I go to the bathroom
and vomit up the
dinner
when I come out
they are all in their
coats and overcoats
waiting in the
kitchen.
I ’m to read in
15 minutes.
there’ll be a
good crowd
they tell me.
for Al—
don’t worry about rejections, pard,
I’ve been rejected
before.
sometimes you make a mistake, taking
the wrong poem
more often I make the mistake, writing
it.
but I like a mount in every race
even though the man
who puts up the morning line
tabs it 30 to one.
I get to thinking about death more and
more
senility
crutches
armchairs
writing purple poetry with a
dripping pen
when the young girls with mouths
like barracudas
bodies like lemon trees
bodies like clouds
bodies like flashes of lightning
stop knocking on my door.
don’t worry about rejections,