Love Is a Dog From Hell_ Poems, 1974-1977 - Charles Bukowski [19]
they stole my oil painting of
two pink eyes.
my car broke down.
eels climb my bathroom walls.
my love is broken.
but the stockmarket went up
today.
a plate glass window
dogs and angels are not
very different.
I often go to this place
to eat
about 2:30 in the afternoon
because all the people who eat
there are particularly addled
simply glad to be alive and
eating baked beans
near a plate glass window
which holds the heat
and doesn’t let the cars and
sidewalks inside.
we are allowed as much free
coffee as we can drink
and we sit and quietly drink
the black strong coffee.
it is good to be sitting someplace
in a world at 2:30 in the afternoon
without having the flesh ripped from
your bones. even
being addled, we know this.
nobody bothers us
we bother nobody.
angels and dogs are not
very different
at 2:30 in the afternoon.
I have my favorite table
and after I have finished
I stack the plates, saucers,
the cup, the silverware
neatly—
my offering to the luck—
and that sun
working good
all up and
down
inside the
darkness
here.
junkies
“she shoots up in the neck,” she told
me. I told her to stick it into my
ass and she tried and said, “oh oh,”
and I said, “what the hell’s the matter?”
she said, “nothing, this is New York
style,” and she jammed it in again and said,
“oh shit.” I took it and put it into
my arm, I got part of it.
“I don’t know why people
fuck with the stuff, there’s not that
much to it. I think they’re all losers
and they want to lose real bad. there’s
no other way, it’s like they can’t
get where they’re going or want to go
and there’s no other way.
this has got to be it.
she shoots up in the neck.”
“I know,” I said. “I phoned her, she
could hardly talk, said it was
laryngitis. have some of this wine.”
it was white wine and 4:30 a.m. and her
daughter was sleeping in the bedroom. she
had cable tv with no sound and
a large screen young John Wayne watched
us, and we neither kissed nor made
love and I left at 6:15 a.m.
after the beer and wine were gone
so her daughter wouldn’t awaken for
school and find me sitting in
bed with her mother
with John Wayne and the night gone
and not much chance for anybody—
99 to one
the blazing shark
wants my balls
as I walk through the meat section
looking for salami and cheese
purple housewives
fingering 75 cent avocados
know my shopping cart is an
oversized cock
I am a man with a switchball watch
standing in a honky-tonk phonebooth
sucking strawberry red titty
upsidedown in a Philadelphia crowd.
suddenly all about me are screams of
RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE
and I am stiffing it to something beneath me
dyed red hair, bad breath, blue teeth
I used to like Monet
I used to like Monet very much
it was funny, I thought, the way he did it
with colors
women are so expensive
dog leashes are expensive
I am going to start selling air in dark orange bags
marked: moon-blooms
I used to like bottles full of blood
young girls in camel-hair coats
Prince Valiant
Popeye’s magic touch
the struggle is in the struggle
like a corkscrew
a good man doesn’t get cork in the wine
the thought has occurred to millions of men
while shaving
the removal of life might be preferred to
the removal of hair
spit out cotton and clean your rearview
mirror, run like you mean it, drunk jock,
the whores will win, the fools will win,
but break like a horse out of the gate.
the crunch
too much
too little
too fat
too thin
or nobody.
laughter or
tears
haters
lovers
strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks
armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.
or an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.