The People Look Like Flowers at Last: New Poems

by Charles Bukowski

  what?

  his words were now

  very pale.

  they spread across the page

  like a mist

  filling it

  but saying

  very little.

  he didn’t seem to be the

  same man.

  where had he gone?

  why do

  such deaths seem

  mysterious?

  it’s well that

  new poets come along

  new quarterbacks

  new matadors

  new dictators

  new revolutionaries

  new butchers

  new pawnbrokers.

  because spiritual death arrives

  much more quickly and unexpectedly than

  physical demise.

  I drop his new book

  into the wastebasket.

  I don’t want it

  around.

  he was now a

  successful writer

  which meant

  that his work

  no longer made

  anybody

  angry

  disgusted

  or sad.

  never made

  anybody

  laugh

  never made

  anybody

  feel that rush of wonder

  while reading

  it.

  but in a world

  where even

  the disappearance

  of the dinosaur

  remains a mystery

  we should accept

  the mysterious fact of

  the vanishing poet.

  and when we accept

  that

  we are simply

  making way for

  our own final

  invisibility.

  our deep sleep

  I’ve always been a sucker for the

  old ones: Céline, Hemingway, Dreiser,

  Sherwood Anderson, e. e. cummings,

  Jeffers, Auden, W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens,

  Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Carson

  McCullers…and some others.

  Our current moderns

  leave me quite

  unsatisfied.

  there is neither lean nor

  fat in their efforts, no pace,

  no gamble, no joy.

  it’s work reading them, hard

  work,

  there is much pretense

  and even some clever con

  behind their productions.

  I have no idea what has

  happened to the creative

  writer since the 1940s.

  there has been a half century

  of utter pap.

  why?

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know.

  there has been little to

  read

  for some time now.

  I have been able to

  read only the newspapers

  and the

  Racing Form.

  all those books printed,

  a million books

  printed

  and nothing to

  read.

  a half century shot to

  shit.

  we deserve nothing

  and that’s what we have

  now.

  the sorry history of myself

  this is a terrible way to live:

  surrounded by

  the ever-

  irascible,

  coldhearted and

  nearly mad.

  but my early experiences were

  quite similar.

  I should be adjusted to it

  all by now

  from my angry boiling

  petty father

  to

  the slew of females

  who came later

  all consumed by

  depression,

  useless rage,

  screeching and

  nonsensical

  self-

  pity.

  happiness and simple joy

  for them all seemed to be

  simply diseases to be

  eradicated.

  this history of

  myself:

  this terrible way to

  live.

  but I feel I have now snatched

  victory

  from all the useless

  raging black

  hysteria.

  I have now survived all

  that and

  they can club me with their

  angry lives and

  burn me on my

  deathbed

  but somehow

  I have found a lasting

  peace

  they can never

  take

  away.

  law

  look, he told me,

  all those little children dying in the trees,

  and I said, what?

  and he said, look,

  and I went to the window

  and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,

  dead and dying,

  and I said, what does it mean?

  and he said, I don’t know but it’s been authorized.

  the next day when I got up

  they had dogs in the trees

  dead and hanging and dying,

  and I turned to my friend and said,

  what does it mean?

  and he said, don’t worry about it,

  it’s the way of things, they took a vote,

  it was decided,

  and the next day it was cats,

  I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast

  and hung them in the trees

  but they did,

  and the next day it was horses and that wasn’t so good

  because many branches broke,

  and after bacon and eggs the next day

  my friend pulled the pistol on me

  over the coffee and said,

  let’s go,

  and we went outside

  and there were all these men and women in the

  trees, most of them dead or

  dying, and he got the rope ready, and I said,

  what does it mean? and he said, don’t worry,

  it’s been authorized, it’s constitutional, it passed by

  majority vote, and he tied my hands behind my back,

  then opened the noose.

  I don’t know who’s going to hang me, he said,

  when I get done with you. I suppose, finally,

  there’ll be just one of us left

  and he’ll have to hang

  himself.

  suppose he doesn’t? I asked.

  he has to, he said, it’s been authorized.

  o, I said, well, let’s get on

  with it

  then.

  a great writer

  a great writer remains in bed

  shades down

  doesn’t want to see anyone

  doesn’t want to write anymore

  doesn’t want to try anymore;

  the editors and publishers wonder:

  some say he’s insane

  some say he’s dead;

  his wife now answers all the mail:

  “…he does not w
ish to…”

  and some others even walk up and down

  outside his house,

  look at the pulled-down

  shades;

  some even go up and ring the

  bell.

  nobody answers.

  the great writer does not want to be

  disturbed. perhaps the great writer is not

  in? perhaps the great writer has gone

  away?

  but they all want to know the truth,

  to hear his voice, to be told some good

  reason for it all.

  if he has a reason

  he does not reveal it.

  perhaps there isn’t any

  reason?

  strange and disturbing arrangements are

  made; his books and paintings are quietly

  auctioned off;

  no new work has appeared now for

  years.

  yet his public won’t accept his

  silence—

  if he is dead

  they want to know; if he is

  insane they want to know; if he has a

  reason, please tell us!

  they walk past his house

  write letters

  ring the bell

  they cannot understand and will not

  accept

  the way things are.

  I rather like

  it.

  a gigantic thirst

  I’ve been on antibodies for almost 6 months, baby, to cure a case of

  TB, man, leave it to an old guy like me to catch such an old-fashioned

  disease, catch it big as a basketball or like a boa constrictor

  swallowing a gibbon; so now I’m on antibodies and been told not to

  drink

  or smoke for 6 months, and talk about biting iron with your

  teeth, I’ve been drinking and smoking heavily and steadily with the

  best

  and the worst of them for over 50 years, yeah,

  and the most difficult part, pard, I know too many people who

  drink and smoke and they just go right on drinking and smoking in

  front of me like

  I’m not aching to crack their skulls and roll them on the floor

  or just chase them the hell away out of my sight—a sight which

  longs very much for anything even microscopically addictive.

  the next hardest part is sitting at the typewriter without it,

  I mean, that’s been my show, my dance, my entertainment, my

  raison d’être, yep, mixing smoke and booze with the typer and you’ve

  got a parlay there where the luck rains down night and day and in

  between, and

  you hear the phrase “cutting it cold turkey” but I don’t think that’s

  strong enough, it should be “chopping it cold turkey” or “burying the

  turkey

  warm,” anyhow it hasn’t been easy, no no no no no no no no no no,

  and when I look at a bottle of beer

  it looks like bottled sunlight, a smoke is like the breath of life

  and a bottle of red wine looks like the blood of life itself.

  for me, it’s hard to think or worry about the future: the immediate

  present seems too overwhelming and now I sympathize with all those

  who fail

  to curb their drinking and their smoking

  because these last 6 months have been the longest 6 months of my life!

  forgive me for boring you with all this but isn’t that why you’re

  here?

  eulogies

  after death

  we exaggerate a person’s good qualities,

  inflate them.

  during life

  we are often repulsed by that same person

  while talking to them on the telephone

  or just being with them in the same room.

  and we are often critical of the way they

  walk, talk, dress

  live

  believe

  but let them die

  then what creatures they

  become.

  if only at a funeral service

  somebody would say,

  “what an odious individual

  that one was!”

  even at my funeral

  let there be a bit of truth,

  then the good clean

  dirt.

  a residue

  stuck in mid-flight,

  wickedly sheared,

  dreaming of the

  dactylozoid.

  turned away,

  fashioned to stop

  on zero,

  flamed out,

  hacked at,

  demobilized.

  where is common

  laughter?

  simple joy?

  where did they

  go?

  what a vanishing

  trick,

  that.

  even the skies

  snarl.

  what rancor,

  what

  bitterness…

  the cry of the

  smothered

  heart,

  now

  remembering

  better

  times

  wild and

  wondrous.

  now the sad

  grim

  present

  cleaves.

  1990 special

  year-worn

  weary to the bone,

  dancing in the dark with the

  dark,

  the Suicide Kid gone

  gray.

  ah, the swift summers

  over and gone

  forever!

  is that death

  stalking me

  now?

  no, it’s only my cat,

  this

  time.

  passage

  and their ships burned, galleon and galley sail,

  and they drowned as the clouds came down

  like kings from thrones and held them:

  servants, slaves, lions, sages, fools, merchants,

  murderers; then the kelp, bitumen, alabaster, seashells

  held court, and then came the shadows,

  dark as walls under a dying sun: and bellicose and

  vicious the sea pounded the sinking ships and the

  weeds cradled the skulls in disquisition, the

  sea kelp held the skulls up and you saw

  them then, so odd and free and casual: all the

  lonely lovers dead.

  a most dark night in April

  each man finally trapped and broken

  each grave ready

  each hawk killed

  and love and luck too.

  the poems have ended

  the throat is dry.

  I suppose there’s no funeral for this

  and no tears

  and no reason.

  pain’s the master

  pain is silent.

  the throats of my poems

  are dry.

  sun coming down

  no one is sorry I am leaving,

  not even I;

  but there should be a minstrel

  or at least a glass of wine.

  it bothers the young most, I think:

  an unviolent slow
death.

  still it makes any man dream;

  you wish for an old sailing ship,

  the white salt-crusted sail

  and the sea shaking out hints of immortality.

  sea in the nose

  sea in the hair

  sea in the marrow, in the eyes

  and yes, there in the chest.

  will we miss

  the love of a woman or music or food

  or the gambol of the great mad muscled

  horse, kicking clods and destinies

  high and away

  in just one moment of the sun coming down?

  but now it’s my turn

  and there’s no majesty in it

  because there was no majesty

  before it

  and each of us, like worms bitten

  out of apples,

  deserves no reprieve.

  death enters my mouth

  and snakes along my teeth

  and I wonder if I am frightened of

  this voiceless, unsorrowful dying that is

  like the drying of a rose?

  About the Author

  CHARLES BUKOWSKI is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twentyfour, and began writing poetry when he was thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three.

  During his lifetime he published over forty-five books of poetry and prose—many translated into more than a dozen languages. His worldwide popularity remains undiminished, and Ecco is proud to publish the five posthumous collections of his work (this volume is the fifth and final) in addition to a new selection of his later works, The Pleasures of the Damned.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  also by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)

  Post Office (1971)