Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame

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Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame Page 8

by Bukowski, Charles


  it’s like being married:

  you accept

  everything

  as if

  it hadn’t happened.

  shot of red-eye

  I used to hold my social security card

  up in the air,

  he told me,

  but I was so small

  they couldn’t see it,

  all those big

  guys around.

  you mean the place with the

  big green screen?

  I asked.

  yeah. well, anyhow, I finally got on

  the other day

  picking tomatoes, and Jesus Christ,

  I couldn’t get anywhere

  it was too hot, too hot

  and I couldn’t get anything in my sack

  so I lay under the truck

  in the shade and drank

  wine. I didn’t make a

  dime.

  have a drink, I said.

  sure, he said.

  two big women came in and

  I mean BIG

  and they sat next to

  us.

  shot of red-eye, one of them

  said to the bartender.

  likewise, said the other.

  they pulled their dresses up

  around their hips and

  swung their legs.

  um, umm. I think I’m going mad, I told

  my friend from the tomato fields.

  Jesus, he said, Jesus and Mary, I can’t

  believe what I see.

  it’s all

  there, I said.

  you a fighter? the one next to me

  asked.

  no, I said.

  what happened to your

  face?

  automobile accident on the San Berdoo

  freeway. some drunk jumped the divider. I was

  the drunk.

  how old are you, daddy?

  old enough to slice the melon, I said,

  tapping my cigar ashes into my beer to give me

  strength.

  can you buy a melon? she asked.

  have you ever been chased across the Mojave and

  raped?

  no, she said.

  I pulled out my last 20 and with an old man’s

  virile abandon ordered

  four drinks.

  both girls smiled and pulled their dresses

  higher, if that was possible.

  who’s your friend? they asked.

  this is Lord Chesterfield, I told them.

  pleased ta meetcha, they

  said.

  hello, bitches, he answered.

  we walked through the 3rd street tunnel

  to a green hotel. the girls had a

  key.

  there was one bed and we all got

  in. I don’t know who got

  who.

  the next morning my friend and I

  were down at the Farm Labor Market

  on San Pedro Street

  holding up and waving our social

  security cards.

  they couldn’t see

  his.

  I was the last one on the truck out. a big woman stood

  up against me. she smelled like

  port wine.

  honey, she asked, whatever happened to your

  face?

  fair grounds, a dancing bear who

  didn’t.

  bullshit, she said.

  maybe so, I said, but get your hand out

  from around my

  balls. everybody’s looking.

  when we got to the

  fields the sun was

  really up

  and the world

  looked

  terrible.

  i met a genius

  I met a genius on the train

  today

  about 6 years old,

  he sat beside me

  and as the train

  ran down along the coast

  we came to the ocean

  and then he looked at me

  and said,

  it’s not pretty.

  it was the first time I’d

  realized

  that.

  poverty

  it is the man you’ve never seen who

  keeps you going,

  the one who might arrive

  someday.

  he isn’t out on the streets or

  in the buildings or in the

  stadiums,

  or if he’s there

  I’ve missed him somehow.

  he isn’t one of our presidents

  or statesmen or actors.

  I wonder if he’s there.

  I walk down the streets

  past drugstores and hospitals and

  theatres and cafes

  and I wonder if he is there.

  I have looked almost half a century

  and he has not been seen.

  a living man, truly alive,

  say when he brings his hands down

  from lighting a cigarette

  you see his eyes

  like the eyes of a tiger staring past

  into the wind.

  but when the hands come down

  it is always the

  other eyes

  that are there

  always always.

  and soon it will be too late for me

  and I will have lived a life

  with drugstores, cats, sheets, saliva,

  newspapers, women, doors and other assortments,

  but nowhere

  a living man.

  to kiss the worms goodnight

  kool enough to die but not

  kill I take my doctor’s green

  pill

  drink tea

  as the sharks swim through vases of

  flowers

  ten times around they go

  twenty

  searching for my sissy

  heart

  in a freak May night in

  Los Angeles

  Sunday

  somebody playing

  Beethoven

  I sit behind pulled shades

  in ambush

  as ambitious men with new automobiles and

  new blondes

  command the streets

  I sit in a rented room

  carving a wooden rifle

  drawing pictures of naked ladies

  bulls

  love affairs

  old men

  on the walls with children’s

  crayons

  it is up to each of us to live in

  whatever way we can

  as the generals, doctors, policemen

  warn and torture

  us

  I bathe once a day

  am frightened by cats and

  shadows

  sleep hardly at all

  when my heart stops

  the whole world will get quicker

  better

  warmer

  summer will follow summer

  the air will be lake clear

  and the meaning

  too

  but meanwhile

  the green pill

  these greasy floors off the

  avenue and

  down there a plot of worms of worms of

  worms

  and up here

  no nymph blonde

  to love me to sleep while I am

  waiting.

  john dillinger and le chasseur maudit

  it’s unfortunate, and simply not the style, but I don’t care:

  girls remind me of hair in the sink, girls remind me of intestines

  and bladders and excretory movements; it’s unfortunate also that

  ice-cream bells, babies, engine-valves, plagiostomes, palm trees,

  footsteps in the hall…all excite me with the cold calmness

  of the gravestone; nowhere, perhaps, is there sanctuary except

  in hearing that ther
e were other desperate men:

  Dillinger, Rimbaud, Villon, Babyface Nelson, Seneca, Van Gogh,

  or desperate women: lady wrestlers, nurses, waitresses, whores

  poetesses…although,

  I do suppose the breaking out of ice-cubes is important

  or a mouse nosing an empty beercan—

  two hollow emptinesses looking into each other,

  or the nightsea stuck with soiled ships

  that enter the chary web of your brain with their lights,

  with their salty lights

  that touch you and leave you

  for the more solid love of some India;

  or driving great distances without reason

  sleep-drugged through open windows that

  tear and flap your shirt like a frightened bird,

  and always the stoplights, always red,

  nightfire and defeat, defeat…

  scorpions, scraps, fardels:

  x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives,

  Beethoven in his grave as dead as a beet;

  red wheel-barrows, yes, perhaps,

  or a letter from Hell signed by the devil

  or two good boys beating the guts out of each other

  in some cheap stadium full of screaming smoke,

  but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here

  with a mouthful of rotten teeth,

  sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and

  Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today);

  and listening to the Dvorak Midday Witch

  or Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit,

  actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate:

  I have been getting letters from a young poet

  (very young, it seems) telling me that some day

  I will most surely be recognized as

  one of the world’s great poets. Poet!

  a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets

  of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being

  nothing, and coming back to my room

  I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile;

  she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires:

  telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces

  trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling,

  and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire

  or the smiling of wire

  and I closed my door (at last)

  but through the windows it was the same:

  a horn honked, somebody laughed, a toilet flushed,

  and oddly then

  I thought of all the horses with numbers

  that have gone by in the screaming,

  gone by like Socrates, gone by like Lorca,

  like Chatterton…

  I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much

  except as a matter of disposal, a problem,

  like dumping the garbage,

  and although I have saved the young poet’s letters,

  I do not believe them

  but like at the

  diseased palm trees

  and the end of the sun,

  I sometimes look.

  the flower lover

  in the Valkerie Mountains

  among the strutting peacocks

  I found a flower

  as large as my

  head

  and when I reached in to smell

  it

  I lost an ear lobe

  part of my nose

  one eye

  and half a pack of

  cigarettes.

  I came back

  the next day

  to hack the damned thing

  down

  but found it so

  beautiful I

  killed a

  peacock

  instead.

  traffic ticket

  I walked off the job again

  and the police stopped me

  for running a red light at Serrano Ave.

  my mind was rather gone

  and I stood in a patch of leaves

  ankle-deep

  and kept my head turned

  so they couldn’t smell the liquor

  too much

  and I took the ticket and went to my room

  and got a good symphony on the radio,

  one of the Russians or Germans,

  one of the dark tough boys

  but still I felt lonely and cold

  and kept lighting cigarettes

  and I turned on the heater

  and then down on the floor

  I saw a magazine with my photo

  on the cover

  and I walked over and picked it up

  but it wasn’t me

  because yesterday is gone

  and today is only catsup

  and racing hounds

  and sickness

  and women some women

  momentarily as beautiful

  as any of the cathedrals,

  and now they play Bartok

  who knew what he was doing

  which meant he didn’t know what he was doing,

  and tomorrow I suppose I will go back

  to the fucking job

  like a man to a wife with four kids

  if they’ll have me

  but today I know that I have gotten out of

  some kind of net,

  30 seconds more and I would have been dead,

  and it is important to recognize

  one should recognize

  that type of moment

  if he wants to continue

  to avail the gut and the sacked skull of a

  flower a mountain a ship a woman

  the code of the frost and the stone

  everything lapsing into a sense of moment

  that cleans like the best damn soap on the market

  and brings Paris, Spain, the groans of Hemingway,

  the blue madonna, the new-born bull,

  a night in a closet with red paint

  right down in on you,

  and I hope to pay the ticket

  even though I did not (I think) run the red light

  but

  they said I did.

  a little sleep and peace of stillness

  if you’re a man, Los Angeles is where you hang it up and

  battle; or if you’re a woman, and you’ve got enough leg and

  the rest, you sail it against a mountain backdrop so

  when you grow grey you can hide in Beverly Hills

  in a mansion so nobody can see how you’ve decayed.

  so we moved here—and what do we come up against

  except a religious maniac in the next shack who

  drinks cheap wine and has visions and plays his radio

  as loudly as possible, my god!

  I know all the spirituals now!

  I know how very much I have sinned and I realize I must die

  and I’ve got to get ready…

  but I could use a little sleep first

  just a little sleep and peace of silence.

  I open the window and there he is

  out on the lawn

  dancing to a hymn

  a spiritual

  a whatever.

  he has on a pair of red bathing trunks

  he’s well-tanned and drunk on wine

  but his movements are hard and awkward—

  he’s too fat

  a walnut-like man, distorted and shapeless at

  55.

  and he waves his arms in the sun and the birds fly up

  frightened

  and then he whirls back into his doorway.

  but the view from the street here is good—

  there are Japanese and old women and young girls and

  beggars.

  we have large palms

  plenty of birds

  and the parking’s not bad…

  but our religious maniac does not work

&nb
sp; he’s too clever to work

  and so we both lie around

  listen to his radio

  drink

  and I wonder which of us will get to hell first—

  him with his bible or me with my Racing Form

  but if I’ve got to hear him down there I know I’m going to have to

  have some help, and the next dance will be mine.

  right now I wish I had something to sell so I could hide in a place

  with walls twelve feet high

  with moats

  and high-yellow mamas.

  but it looks like some long days and nights ahead,

  as always.

  at the least I can only hope for the weakening of a

  radio tube,

  and at the most for his death,

  which we are both praying and

  ready for.

  he even looked like a nice guy

  he packaged it up neatly in different sections

  sending the legs to an aunt in St. Louis

  the head to a scoutmaster in Brooklyn

  the belly to a cross-eyed butcher in Des Moines,

  the female organs were sent to a young priest in Los Angeles;

 

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