You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense - Charles Bukowski [1]
he just sat there
looking straight
ahead.
his woman did
likewise.
they wouldn’t look
at me.
he was 30 years
younger
but I knew I could
take him
he was soft and
pampered.
I beat on the window
with my
fist:
“come on out, shithead,
or I’m going to start
breaking
glass!”
he gave a small nod
to his
woman.
I saw her reach
into the glove
compartment
open it
and slip him the
.32
I saw him hold it
down low
and snap off the
safety.
I walked off
toward the
clubhouse, it looked
like a damned good
card
that
day.
all I had to do
was
be there.
retired
pork chops, said my father, I love
pork chops!
and I watched him slide the grease
into his mouth.
pancakes, he said, pancakes with
syrup, butter and bacon!
I watched his lips heavy wetted with
all that.
coffee, he said, I like coffee so hot
it burns my throat!
sometimes it was too hot and he spit it
out across the table.
mashed potatoes and gravy, he said, I
love mashed potatoes and gravy!
he jowled that in, his cheeks puffed as
if he had the mumps.
chili and beans, he said, I love chili and
beans!
and he gulped it down and farted for hours
loudly, grinning after each fart.
strawberry shortcake, he said, with vanilla
ice cream, that’s the way to end a meal!
he always talked about retirement, about
what he was going to do when he
retired.
when he wasn’t talking about food he talked
on and on about
retirement.
he never made it to retirement, he died one day while
standing at the sink
filling a glass of water.
he straightened like he’d been
shot.
the glass fell from his hand
and he dropped backwards
landing flat
his necktie slipping to the
left.
afterwards
people said they couldn’t believe
it.
he looked
great.
distinguished white
sideburns, pack of smokes in his
shirt pocket, always cracking
jokes, maybe a little
loud and maybe with a bit of bad
temper
but all in all
a seemingly sound
individual
never missing a day
of work.
working it out
in this steamy a.m. Hades claps its Herpes hands and
a woman sings through my radio, her voice comes clambering
through the smoke, and the wine fumes…
it’s a lonely time, she sings, and you’re not
mine and it makes me feel so bad,
this thing of being me…
I can hear cars on the freeway, it’s like a distant sea
sludged with people
while over my other shoulder, far over on 7th street
near Western
is the hospital, that house of agony—
sheets and bedpans and arms and heads and
expirations;
everything is so sweetly awful, so continuously and
sweetly awful: the art of consummation: life eating
life…
once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own
tail, it swallowed and swallowed until
it got halfway round, and there it stopped and
there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own
self. some fix, that.
we only have ourselves to go on, and it’s
enough…
I go downstairs for another bottle, switch on the
cable and there’s Greg Peck pretending he’s
F. Scott and he’s very excited and he’s reading his
manuscript to his lady.
I turn the set
off.
what kind of writer is that? reading his pages to
a lady? this is a violation…
I return upstairs and my two cats follow me, they are
fine fellows, we have no discontent, we have no
arguments, we listen to the same music, never vote for a
president.
one of my cats, the big one, leaps on the back
of my chair, rubs against my shoulders and
neck.
“no good,” I tell him, “I’m not going
to read you this
poem.”
he leaps to the floor and walks out to the
balcony and his buddy
follows.
they sit and watch the night; we’ve got the
power of sanity here.
these early a.m. mornings when almost everybody
is asleep, small night bugs, winged things
enter, and circle and whirl.
the machine hums its electric hum, and having
opened and tasted the new bottle I type the next
line. you
can read it to your lady and she’ll probably tell you
it’s nonsense. she’ll be
reading Tender Is the
Night.
beasts bounding through time—
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his