Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

by Charles Bukowski

  the arms he threw to his dog

  and he kept the hands to use as nut-crackers, and all the

  leftover and assorted parts

  like breasts and buttocks he boiled into a soup

  which strangely

  tasted better than she ever had.

  he spent the money in her purse

  he bought good French wine, frijoles, a pound of grass

  and two parakeets; he bought the collected works of

  Keats, a 5 foot square red bandana, a scissors with

  ivory handles, and a box of candy for his

  landlady.

  then he drank and ate and slept for three days and nights

  and when the police came

  he seemed very friendly and calm

  and all the way to the station house

  he talked of the weather, the color of the mountains,

  various things like that, he didn’t seem like that kind of killer

  at all.

  it was very strange.

  children in the sky

  the boys come up

  the boys climb up the

  brown pole

  as the waterheater gurgles

  in Spanish

  the boys climb the

  brown pole—

  Charlemagne fought for this

  Il Duce was tilted from his car

  skinned like a bear

  and hung

  upsidedown

  for this—

  the boys climb up

  the brown pole

  3 or 4 of

  them;

  we have just moved in

  this building,

  the paintings still

  unpacked, the letters from

  England and Chicago and

  Cheyenne and

  New Orleans,

  but the beer’s on

  and there are 5 oranges

  and 4 pears on the table

  so life’s not

  bad

  except somebody wanted

  $15 to

  turn on the gas;

  the boys climb the phonepole

  to leap onto the

  bluegreen

  garage roofs

  and I stand naked

  behind a curtain,

  smoking a cigar,

  and impressed

  impressed as I can be

  as if

  the Virgin Mary

  was dancing

  outside;

  and through the window

  to the North

  I can see 2 men

  feeding

  45 pigeons

  and the pigeons

  walk in separate circles

  of 8 or 10

  as if tied together

  by a revolving string,

  and it is 3 o’clock

  in the afternoon and

  a good cigar.

  Cicero fought for this,

  Jake LaMotta and

  Waslaw Nijinsky,

  but somebody stole

  our guitar

  and I haven’t taken my

  vitamins

  for weeks.

  the boys run on the

  greenblue roofs

  as to the North the

  pigeons rise;

  it is desperately

  holy

  and I blow out

  grey and quiet

  smoke.

  then a woman in a red coat,

  evidently an official,

  some matron of

  learning

  decides that

  the sky needs

  cleaning:

  Hey!!! you boys get

  DOWN

  from there!

  it is beautiful as

  deer

  running from the

  hunter.

  Agrippina fought for this,

  even Mithridates,

  even William Hazlitt.

  there is nothing to do

  now

  but unpack.

  the weather is hot on the back of my watch

  the weather is hot on the back of my watch

  which is down at Finkelstein’s

  who is gifted with 3 balls

  but no heart, but you’ve got to understand

  when the bull goes down

  or the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else,

  and let’s not over-rate obvious decency

  for in a crap game you may be cutting down

  some wobbly king of 6 kids

  and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check,

  and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn?

  not I, Henry,

  and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes,

  maybe you should have stuck it into something else

  like an oil well

  or a herd of cows.

  I’m too old to argue,

  I’ve gone with the poem

  and been k.o.’d with the old sucker-punch

  round after round,

  but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser

  or any other fool full of medals and nothing else,

  or the first time we read Dos

  or Eliot with his trousers rolled;

  the weather is hot on the back of my watch

  which is down at Finkelstein’s,

  but you know what they say: things are tough all over,

  and I remember once on the bum in Texas

  I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns

  jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate

  and the crows came down half-dead, half-living,

  and they clubbed them to death to save their shells

  but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows

  and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and

  stuck out their tongues

  and mourned their dead and elected new leaders

  and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap.

  you can only kill what shouldn’t be there,

  and Finkelstein should be there and my watch

  and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad

  they are supposed to be bad and if they are good

  they are likewise supposed to be—although there is a minor

  fight to be fought,

  but still I am sad

  because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands,

  way off course, not even wanting to be there,

  two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me

  and asked me what time it was

  and I wouldn’t tell him,

  and later they gathered them up for burning

  as if they were no better than dung with feathers,

  feathers and a little gasoline,

  and from the bottom of one pile

  a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me.

  it was 4:35 p.m.

  note to a lady who expected rupert brooke

  wha’, what did you expect? a schoolboy lisping Donne? or

  some more practical lover filling you with the stench of Life?

  I’m a fool and no gentleman: I walked the Brooklyn Bridge

  with Crane in pajamas, but suicide fails as you get older:

  there’s less and less to kill.

  so among the skin and lambchops, the sick neckties of

  other closets, I scheme schemes round as oranges

  filled with the music of my crafty mumbling.

  Brooke? no. I am a monkey with an olive lost in the

  circus sand of your laughter, circus apes, circus tigers,

  circus madmen of finance screwing their secretaries before

  the 5:15…and what did you expect?

  a pink-cheek dribbling Picasso colors on your dry brain?

  so, the room was blue with the smoke of my boiling, hell,

  a senseless sea

  and
I fell fingers sotted to the last pinch of your juice,

  fell through the thorned vines cursing your name,

  no gentleman

  no gentleman,

  kissed-off love like snake-bite,

  the veranda buzzed with flies, buzzed with flies

  and lies, and your red mouth screamed,

  your lamps screamed

  breaking like overdue bills:

  DRUNK! DRUNK AGAIN!

  O, YOU IDIOT!

  so, Yeats, Keats, teats…nothing but an apricot!

  wha’, what happened to Spain? my boy Lorca?

  the revolution? must join the brigade!

  lemme outa here!

  the difference between a bad poet and a good one is luck

  I suppose so.

  I was living in an attic in Philadelphia

  it became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the

  bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left

  I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer

  looking for work…

  which was a god damned lie; I was a writer

  looking for a little time and a little food and some

  attic rent.

  a couple of days later when I finally came home

  from somewhere

  the landlady said, there was somebody looking for

  you. and I said,

  there must be some mistake. she said,

  no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write

  a history book.

  oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s

  rent—I mean, on the cuff—

  so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the

  hot pigeons

  suffer and fuck on my hot roof.

  I turned the radio on real loud

  drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book

  interesting but true.

  but the bastard never came back,

  and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang

  going West

  and they gave us cans of food but no

  openers

  and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of

  railroad cars a hundred years old with dust

  the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like

  candlewick

  and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in

  Texas

  all green with nice-looking houses in the

  distance

  1 found a park

  slept all night

  and then they found me and put me in a cell

  and they asked me about murders and

  robberies.

  they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books

  to prove their efficiency

  but I wasn’t that tired

  and they drove me to the next big town

  fifty-seven miles away

  the big one kicked me in the ass

  and they drove off.

  but I lucked it:

  two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall

  half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow

  and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council

  and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening

  as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being

  dismantled.

  later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over

  me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me

  cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War!

  and they all came to her house—

  all the cowboys, all the cowboys:

  fat, dull and covered with dust.

  and we all shook hands.

  I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said

  oh, you’re a writer, eh?

  and I said: well, some think so.

  and some still think so…

  others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet.

  two weeks later they

  ran me out

  of town.

  the curtains are waving and people walk through the afternoon here and in Berlin and in New York City and in Mexico

  I wait on life like a pregnancy, put the stethoscope to

  the gut

  but all I hear now is

  the piano slamming its teeth through areas of my

  brain

  (somebody in this neighborhood likes

  Gershwin which is too bad

  for

  me)

  and the woman sits behind me

  sits there sits there

  and keeps lighting cigarettes

  and now the nurses leave the hospital near here

  and they wear dresses that are naked in the sun

  to cheer the dead and the dying and the doctors

  but it does not help

  me

  if I could rip them with moans of delight it

  would neither add or take away

  anything

  now now

  a horn blows a tired

  summer like a gladiola given up and leaning against a

  house and

  the bottles we have emptied would strangle the

  sensibilities…of God

  now I look up and see my face in the mirror:

  if I could only kill the man who killed the

  man

  more than coffeepots and cheroots have done me

  in more than myself has done me

  in

  madness comes like a mouse out of the cupboard and

  they hand me a photograph of the

  moon

  the woman behind me has a daughter who falls in love

  with men in beards and sandals and berets

  who smoke pipes and carefully comb their hair and

  play chess and talk continually of the

  soul and of Art

  this is good enough: you’ve got to love

  something

  now the landlord waters outside dripping the

  plants with false rain

  Gershwin is finished now it sounds like

  Greig

  o, it’s all so common and hard! impossible!

  I do wish somebody would go blackberry

  wild

  but no

  I suppose it will be the

  same: a beer and then another

  beer and then another

  beer

  maybe then a halfpint of

  scotch

  three cigars—smoke smoke yes smoke

  under the electric sun of night

  hidden here in these walls with this woman and her

  life while

  the police are taking the drunks off the

  streets

  I do not know how much longer I can

  last

  but I keep thinking

  ow! my god!

  the

  gladiola will straighten hard and

  full of

  color like an

  arrow pointing at the

  sun

  Christ will shudder like

  marmalade

  my cat will look like Gandhi once

  looked

  everything everything

  even the tiles in the men’s room at the

  Union Station will be

  true

  all those mirrors there

  finally with faces in them

  roses

  forests

  no more policemen

  no more

  me.

  for the mercy-mongers

  it is justified

  all dying is justified

  all killing all death all

  passing,

  nothing is in vain

  not even the neck

  of a fly,

  and a flower

  passes through the armies />
  and like a small boy

  bragging,

  lifts up its

  color.

  IV

  Burning In Water Drowning In Flame

  Poems 1972-1973

  if you think I have gone crazy

  try picking a flower from the garden of your

  neighbor

  now

  I had boils the size of tomatoes

  all over me

  they stuck a drill into me

  down at the county hospital,

  and

  just as the sun went down

  everyday

  there was a man in a nearby ward

  he’d start hollering for his friend Joe.

  JOE! he’d holler, OH JOE! JOE! J O E!

  COME GET ME, JOE!

  Joe never came by.

  I’ve never heard such mournful

  sounds.

  Joe was probably working off a

  piece of ass or

  attempting to solve a crossword puzzle.

  I’ve always said

  if you want to find out who your friends are

  go to a madhouse or

  jail.

  and if you want to find out where love is not

  be a perpetual

  loser.

  I was very lucky with my boils

  being drilled and tortured

  against the backdrop of the Sierra Madre mountains

  while that sun went down;

  when that sun went down I knew what I would do

  when I finally got that drill in my hands