Love Is a Dog From Hell_ Poems, 1974-1977 - Charles Bukowski [5]
have triumphed again.
here it comes running
with a slug in its
mouth, it’s singing
old love songs.
close the windows
moan
close the doors
groan.
an almost made up poem
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’s all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’m not jealous
because we’ve never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame—not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ve told
us, but listening to you I wasn’t sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “print her, print her, she’s mad but she’s
magic. there’s no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’t happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’t help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.
blue cheese and chili peppers
these women are supposed to come
and see me
but they never
do.
there’s the one with the long scar along her
belly.
there’s the other who writes poems
and phones at 3 a.m., saying,
“I love you.”
there’s the one who dances with a
boa constrictor
and writes every four
weeks, she’ll
come, she says.
and the 4th who claims she sleeps
always
with my latest book
under her
pillow.
I whack-off in the heat
and listen to Brahms and eat
blue cheese with chili
peppers.
these are women of good mind and
body, excellent in or out of bed,
dangerous and deadly, of
course—
but why do they all have to live
up north?
I know that someday they’ll
arrive, but two or three
on the same day, and
we’ll sit around and talk
and then they’ll all leave
together.
somebody else will have them
and I will walk about
in my floppy shorts
smoking too many cigarettes
and trying to make drama
out of
no damned progress
at all.
problems about the other woman
I had worked my charms on her
for a couple of nights in a bar—
not that we were new lovers,
I had loved her for 16 months
but she didn’t want to come to my place
“because that other woman has been there,”
and I said, “all right, all right, what will we do?”
she had come in from the north and was looking for a
place to stay
meanwhile rooming with her girlfriend,
and she went to her rent-a-trailer
and got out some blankets and said,
“let’s go to the park.”
I told her she was crazy
the cops would get us
but she said, “no, it’s nice and foggy,”
so we went to the park
spread out the equipment and began
working and here came headlights—
a squad car—
she said, “hurry, get your pants on! I’ve got mine
on!”
I said, “I can’t. they’re all twisted-up.”
and they came with flashlights
and asked what we were doing and she said,
“kissing!” one of the cops looked at me and
said, “I don’t blame you,” and after some small
talk they left us alone.
but she still didn’t want the bed where that woman
had been,
so we ended