Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame

by Bukowski, Charles

but not so very much

  poetry.

  the state of world affairs

  from a 3rd floor window

  I am watching a girl dressed in a

  light green sweater, blue shorts, long black stockings;

  there is a necklace of some sort

  but her breasts are small, poor thing,

  and she watches her nails

  as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass

  in erratic circles;

  a pigeon is there too, circling,

  half dead with a tick of a brain

  and I am upstairs in my underwear,

  3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting

  for something literary or symphonic to happen;

  but they keep circling, circling, and a thin old man

  in his last winter rolls by pushed by a girl

  in a catholic school dress;

  somewhere there are the Alps, and ships

  are now crossing the sea;

  there are piles and piles of H- and A-bombs,

  enough to blow up fifty worlds and Mars thrown in,

  but they keep circling,

  the girl shifts buttocks,

  and the Hollywood Hills stand there, stand there

  full of drunks and insane people and

  much kissing in automobiles,

  but it’s no good: che sera, sera:

  her dirty white dog simply will not shit,

  and with a last look at her nails

  she, with much whirling of buttocks

  walks to her downstairs court

  trailed by her constipated dog (simply not worried),

  leaving me looking at a most unsymphonic pigeon.

  well, from the looks of things, relax:

  the bombs will never go off.

  for marilyn m.

  slipping keenly into bright ashes,

  target of vanilla tears

  your sure body lit candles for men

  on dark nights,

  and now your night is darker

  than the candle’s reach

  and we will forget you, somewhat,

  and it is not kind

  but real bodies are nearer

  and as the worms pant for your bones,

  I would so like to tell you

  that this happens to bears and elephants

  to tyrants and heroes and ants

  and frogs,

  still, you brought us something,

  some type of small victory,

  and for this I say: good

  and let us grieve no more;

  like a flower dried and thrown away,

  we forget, we remember,

  we wait. child, child, child,

  I raise my drink a full minute

  and smile.

  the life of borodin

  the next time you listen to Borodin

  remember he was just a chemist

  who wrote music to relax;

  his house was jammed with peor e:

  students, artists, drunkards, bur s,

  and he never knew how to say: no.

  the next time you listen to Borodin

  remember his wife used his compositions

  to line the cat boxes with

  or to cover jars of sour milk;

  she had asthma and insomnia

  and fed him soft-boiled eggs

  and when he wanted to cover his head

  to shut out the sounds of the house

  she only allowed him to use the sheet;

  besides there was usually somebody

  in his bed

  (they slept separately when they slept

  at all)

  and since all the chairs

  were usually taken

  he often slept on the stairway

  wrapped in an old shawl;

  she told him when to cut his nails,

  not to sing or whistle

  or put too much lemon in his tea

  or press it with a spoon;

  Symphony #2, in B Minor

  Prince Igor

  On the Steppes of Central Asia

  he could sleep only by putting a piece

  of dark cloth over his eyes;

  in 1887 he attended a dance

  at the Medical Academy

  dressed in a merrymaking national costume;

  at last he seemed exceptionally gay

  and when he fell to the floor,

  they thought he was clowning.

  the next time you listen to Borodin,

  remember…

  no charge

  this babe in the grandstand

  with dyed red hair

  kept leaning her breasts against me

  and talking about Gardena

  poker parlors

  but I blew smoke into

  her face

  and told her about a Van Gogh

  exhibition

  I’d seen up on the hill

  and that night

  when I took her home

  she said

  Big Red was the best horse

  she’d ever seen—

  until I stripped down. Though I

  think on the Van Gogh thing

  they charged

  50 cents.

  a literary romance

  I met her somehow through correspondence or poetry or magazines

  and she began sending me very sexy poems about rape and lust,

  and this being mixed in with a minor intellectualism

  confused me somewhat and I got in my car and drove North

  through the mountains and valleys and freeways

  without sleep, coming off a drunk, just divorced,

  jobless, aging, tired, wanting mostly to sleep

  for five or ten years, I finally found the motel

  in a small sunny town by a dirt road,

  and I sat there smoking a cigarette

  thinking, you must really be insane,

  and then I got out an hour late

  to meet my date; she was pretty damned old,

  almost as old as I, not very sexy

  and she gave me a very hard raw apple

  which I chewed on with my remaining teeth;

  she was dying of some unnamed disease

  something like asthma, and she said,

  I want to tell you a secret, and I said,

  I know: you are a virgin, 35 years old.

  and she got out a notebook, ten or twelve poems:

  a life’s work and I had to read them

  and I tried to be kind

  but they were very bad.

  and I took her somewhere, the boxing matches,

  and she coughed in the smoke

  and kept looking around and around

  at all the people

  and then at the fighters

  clenching her hands.

  you never get excited, do you? she asked.

  but I got pretty excited in the hills that night,

  and met her three or four more times

  helped her with some of her poems

  and she rammed her tongue halfway down my throat

  but when I left her

  she was still a virgin

  and a very bad poetess.

  I think that when a woman has kept her legs closed

  for 35 years

  it’s too late

  either for love

  or for

  poetry.

  the twins

  he hinted at times that I was a bastard and I told him to listen

  to Brahms, and I told him to learn to paint and drink and not be

  dominated by women and dollars

  but he screamed at me, For Christ’s Sake remember your mother,

  remember your country,

  you’ll kill us all!…

  I move through my father’s house (on which he owed $8,000 after 20

  years on the same job) and look at his dead shoes

  the way his feet curled the leather, as if he was angrily plan
ting roses,

  and he was, and I look at his dead cigarette, his last cigarette

  and the last bed he slept in that night, and I feel I should remake it

  but I can’t, for a father is always your master even when he’s gone;

  I guess these things have happened time and again but I can’t help

  thinking

  to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o’clock in the morning

  while other people are frying eggs

  is not so rough

  unless it happens to you.

  I go outside and pick an orange and peel back the bright skin;

  things are still living: the grass is growing quite well,

  the sun sends down its rays circled by a Russian satellite,

  a dog barks senselessly somewhere, the neighbors peek behind blinds.

  I am a stranger here, and have been (I suppose) somewhat the rogue,

  and I have no doubt he painted me quite well (the old boy and I

  fought like mountain lions) and they say he left it all to some woman

  in Duarte but I don’t give a damn—she can have it: he was my old

  man

  and he died.

  inside, I try on a light blue suit

  much better than anything I have ever worn

  and I flap the arms like a scarecrow in the wind

  but it’s no good:

  I can’t keep him alive

  no matter how much we hated each other.

  we looked exactly alike, we could have been twins

  the old man and I: that’s what they

  said. he had his bulbs on the screen

  ready for planting

  while I was lying with a whore from 3rd street.

  very well. grant us this moment: standing before a mirror

  in my dead father’s suit

  waiting also

  to die.

  the day it rained

  at the los angeles

  county museum

  the jew bent over and

  died. 99 machine guns

  were shipped to France. somebody won the 3rd race

  while I inspected

  the propeller of an old monoplane

  a man came by with a patch over his eye. it began to

  rain, it rained and it rained and the ambulances ran

  together

  in the streets, and although

  everything was properly dull

  I enjoyed the moment

  like the time in New Orleans

  living on candy bars

  and watching the pigeons

  in a back alley with a French name

  as behind me the river became

  a gulf

  and the clouds moved sickly through

  a sky that had died

  about the time Caesar was knifed,

  and I promised myself then

  that someday I’d remember it

  as it was.

  a man came by and coughed.

  think it’ll stop raining? he said.

  I didn’t answer. I touched the

  old propeller and listened to the

  ants on the roof rushing over

  the edge of the world, go away, I said,

  go away or I’ll call

  the guard.

  2 p.m. beer

  nothing matters

  but flopping on a mattress

  with cheap dreams and a beer

  as the leaves die and the horses die

  and the landladies stare in the halls;

  brisk the music of pulled shades,

  a last man’s cave

  in an eternity of swarm

  and explosion;

  nothing but the dripping sink,

  the empty bottle,

  euphoria,

  youth fenced in,

  stabbed and shaven,

  taught words

  propped up

  to die.

  hooray say the roses

  hooray say the roses, today is blamesday

  and we are red as blood.

  hooray say the roses, today is Wednesday

  and we bloom where soldiers fell,

  and lovers too,

  and the snake ate the word.

  hooray say the roses, darkness comes

  all at once, like lights gone out,

  the sun leaves dark continents

  and rows of stone.

  hooray say the roses, cannons and spires,

  birds, bees, bombers, today is Friday

  the hand holding a medal out the window,

  a moth going by, half a mile an hour,

  hooray hooray

  hooray say the roses

  we wave empires on our stems,

  the sun moves the mouth:

  hooray hooray hooray

  and that is why you like us.

  the sunday artist

  I have been painting these last two Sundays;

  it’s not much, you’re correct,

  but in this tournament great dreams break:

  history removes her dress and becomes a harlot,

  and I have awakened in the morning

  to see eagles flapping their wings like shades;

  I have met Montaigne and Phidias

  in the flames of my wastebasket,

  I have met barbarians on the streets

  their heads rocking with rodents;

  I have seen wicked infants in blue tubs

  wanting stems as beautiful as flowers,

  and I have seen the barfly sick

  over his last dead penny;

  I have heard Domenico Theotocopoulos

  on nights of frost, cough in his grave;

  and God, no taller than a landlady,

  hair dyed red, has asked me the time;

  I have seen grey grass of lovers in my mirror

  while lighting a cigarette to a maniac’s applause;

  Cadillacs have crawled my walls like roaches,

  goldfish whirl my bowl, hand-tamed tigers;

  yes, I have been painting these Sundays—

  the grey mill, the new rebel; it’s terrible really:

  I must ram my fist through cleanser and chlorine,

  through Andernach and apples and acid,

  but, then, I really should tell you that I have a

  woman around mixing waffle flour and singing,

  and the paint sticks to my plan like candy.

  old poet

  I would, of course, prefer to be with the fox in the ferns

  instead of with a photograph of an old Spad in my pocket

  to the sound of the anvil chorus and legs legs legs

  girls kicking high, showing everything but the pisser,

  but I might as well be dead right now

  everywhere the ill wind blows

  and Keats is dead

  and I am dying too.

  for there is nothing as crappy dissolute

  as an old poet gone sour

  in body and mind

  and luck, the horses running nothing but out,

  the Vegas dice cancer to the thin green wallet,

  Shostakovich heard too often

  and cans of beer sucked through a straw,

  with mouth and mind broken in

  young men’s alleys.

  in the hot noon window

  I swing and miss a razzing fly,

  and ho, I fall heavy as thunder

  but downstairs they’ll understand:

  he’s either drunk or dying,

  an old poet nodding vaguely in halls,

  cracking his stick across the backs

  of innocent dogs

  and spitting out

  what’s left of his sun.

  the mailman has some little thing for him

  which he takes to his room

  and opens like a rose,

  only to scream loudly and vainly,

  and his coffin is filled

  with notes from hell.

  but
in the morning you’ll see him

  packing off little envelopes,

  still worried about

  rent

  cigarettes

  wine

  women

  horses,

  still worried about

  Eric Coates, Beethoven’s 3rd and

  something Chicago has held for three months

  and his paper bag of wine

  and Pall Malls.

  42 in August, 42,

  the rats walking his brain

  eating up the thoughts before they

  can make the keys.

  old poets are as bad as old queers:

  there’s something quite unacceptable:

  the editors wish to thank you for

  submitting but

  regret…

  down

  down

  down

  the dark hall

  into a womanless hall

  to peel a last egg

  and sit down to the keys:

  click click a click,

  over the television sounds

  over the sounds of springs,

  click clack a clack:

  another old poet

  going off.

  the race

  it is like this

  when you slip down,

  done like a wound-up victrola

  (you remember those?)

  and you go downtown

  and watch the boys punch

  but the big blondes sit with

  someone else

  and you’ve aged like a punk in a movie:

  cigar in skull, fat gut,

  but only no money,

  no wiseness of way, no worldliness,

  but as usual

  most of the fights are bad,

  and afterwards

  back in the parking lot

  you sit and watch them go,

  light the last cigar,

  and then start the old car,

  old car, not so young man

  going down the street

  stopped by a red light