The Pleasures of the Damned - Charles Bukowski [2]
they did not know, they too were not prepared to
teach.
we were too naive to ignore their
counsel
and now we have embraced their
ignorance as our
own.
we are them, multiplied.
we are their unpaid debts.
we are bankrupt
in money and
in spirit.
there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the
edge
and will
at any moment
tumble down to join the rest
of us,
the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly
corrupt.
a great white light dawns across the
continent,
the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,
as grotesque and ultimately
unlivable
our 21st century
struggles to beborn.
his wife, the painter
There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.
“I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are at work.”
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he
fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like
a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.
He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than
his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he
self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.
Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.) Paris,
Bibliothe`que Nationale.
“She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”
“What is it? A love affair?”
“Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”
I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a
lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,
and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that
clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…
men drive cars and paint their houses,
but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.
Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.
Paris, Louvre
“I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”
“Are you still reading Freud?”
“Page 299.”
She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one
arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the
snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve
time and the dog.
About church: the trouble with a mask is it
never changes.
So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.
So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs
and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the
wind like the end of a tunnel.
He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some
segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.
When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches
warmer and more blood-real than the dove.
Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.
Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.
He burned away in sleep.
on the sidewalk and in the sun
I have seen an old man around town recently
carrying an enormous pack.
he uses a walking stick
and moves up and down the streets
with this pack strapped to his back.
I keep seeing him.
if he’d only throw that pack away, I think,
he’d have a chance, not much of a chance
but a chance.
and he’s in a tough district—east Hollywood.
they aren’t going to give him a
dry bone in east Hollywood.
he is lost. with that pack.
on the sidewalk and in the sun.
god almighty, old man, I think, throw away that
pack.
then I drive on, thinking of my own
problems.
the last time I saw him he was not walking.
it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent,
the pack still strapped to his back.
I slowed down to look at his face.
I had seen one or two other men in my life
with looks on their faces like
that.
I speeded up and turned on the
radio.
I knew that look.
I would never see him again.
the elephants of Vietnam
first they used to, he told me,