The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses

by Charles Bukowski

  before the band stopped playing;

  and now it’s like a war, uniforms

  everywhere, behind cars and brush,

  and plang plang plang

  my cellar is all fireworks, and I

  fire back, the colt as hot as a

  baked potato, I fire back and sing

  sing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory

  of the coming of the Lord; He is

  tramping out the vintage…”

  these things

  these things that we support most well

  have nothing to do with us,

  and we do with them

  out of of boredom or fear or money

  or cracked intelligence;

  our circle and our candle of light

  being small,

  so small we cannot bear it,

  we heave out with Idea

  and lose the Center:

  all wax without the wick,

  and we see names that once meant wisdom,

  like signs into ghost towns,

  and only the graves are real.

  poem for personnel managers:

  An old man asked me for a cigarette

  and I carefully dealt out two.

  “Been lookin’ for job. Gonna stand

  in the sun and smoke.”

  He was close to rags and rage

  and he leaned against death.

  It was a cold day, indeed, and trucks

  loaded and heavy as old whores

  banged and tangled on the streets…

  We drop like planks from a rotting floor

  as the world strives to unlock the bone

  that weights its brain.

  (God is a lonely place without steak.)

  We are dying birds

  we are sinking ships—

  the world rocks down against us

  and we

  throw out our arms

  and we

  throw out our legs

  like the death kiss of the centipede:

  but they kindly snap our backs

  and call our poison “politics.”

  Well, we smoked, he and I—little men

  nibbling fish-head thoughts…

  All the horses do not come in,

  and as you watch the lights of the jails

  and hospitals wink on and out,

  and men handle flags as carefully as babies,

  remember this:

  you are a great-gutted instrument of

  heart and belly, carefully planned—

  so if you take a plane for Savannah,

  take the best plane;

  or if you eat chicken on a rock,

  make it a very special animal.

  (You call it a bird; I call birds

  flowers.)

  And if you decide to kill somebody,

  make it anybody and not somebody:

  some men are made of more special, precious

  parts: do not kill

  if you will

  a president or a King

  or a man

  behind a desk—

  these have heavenly longitudes

  enlightened attitudes.

  If you decide,

  take us

  who stand and smoke and glower;

  we are rusty with sadness and

  feverish

  with climbing broken ladders.

  Take us:

  we were never children

  like your children.

  We do not understand love songs

  like your inamorata.

  Our faces are cracked linoleum,

  cracked through with the heavy, sure

  feet of our masters.

  We are shot through with carrot tops

  and poppyseed and tilted grammar;

  we waste days like mad blackbirds

  and pray for alcoholic nights.

  Our silk-sick human smiles wrap around

  us like somebody else’s confetti:

  we do not even belong to the Party.

  We are a scene chalked-out with the

  sick white brush of Age.

  We smoke, asleep as a dish of figs.

  We smoke, dead as a fog.

  Take us.

  A bathtub murder

  or something quick and bright; our names

  in the papers.

  Known, at last, for a moment

  to millions of careless and grape-dull eyes

  that hold themselves private

  to only flicker and flame

  at the poor cracker-barrel jibes

  of their conceited, pampered correct comedians.

  Known, at last, for a moment,

  as they will be known

  and as you will be known

  by an all-gray man on an all-gray horse

  who sits and fondles a sword

  longer than the night

  longer than the mountain’s aching backbone

  longer than all the cries

  that have a-bombed up out of throats

  and exploded in a newer, less-planned

  land.

  We smoke and the clouds do not notice us.

  A cat walks by and shakes Shakespeare off of his back.

  Tallow, tallow, candle like wax: our spines

  are limp and our consciousness burns

  guilelessly away

  the remaining wick life has

  doled out to us.

  An old man asked me for a cigarette

  and told me his troubles

  and this

  is what he said:

  that Age was a crime

  and that Pity picked up the marbles

  and that Hatred picked up the

  cash.

  He might have been your father

  or mine.

  He might have been a sex-fiend

  or a saint.

  But whatever he was,

  he was condemned

  and we stood in the sun and

  smoked

  and looked around

  in our leisure

  to see who was next in

  line.

  ice for the eagles

  I keep remembering the horses

  under the moon

  I keep remembering feeding the horses

  sugar

  white oblongs of sugar

  more like ice,

  and they had heads like

  eagles

  bald heads that could bite and

  did not.

  The horses were more real than

  my father

  more real than God

  and they could have stepped on my

  feet but they didn’t

  they could have done all kinds of horrors

  but they didn’t.

  I was almost 5

  but I have not forgotten yet;

  o my god they were strong and good

  those red tongues slobbering

  out of their souls.

  plea to a passing maid

  girl in shorts, biting your nails, revolving your ass,

  the boys are looking at you—

  you hold more, it seems,

  than Gauguin or Brahma or Balzac,

  more, at least, than the skulls that swim at our feet,

  your swagger breaks the Eiffel tower,

  turns the heads of old newsboys long ago gone

  sexually to pot;

  your caged malarkey, your idiot’s dance,

  mugging it, delightful—don’t ever wash stained under-

  wear or chase your acts of love

  through neighborhood alleys—

  don’t spoil it for us,

  putting on weight and weariness,

  settling for TV and a namby-pamby husband;

  don’t give up that absurd dispossessed wiggle

  to water a Saturday’s front lawn—

  don’t send us back to Balzac or introspection

  or Paris

  or wine, don’t se
nd us back

  to the incubation of our doubts or the memory

  of death-wiggle, bitch, madden us with love

  and hunger, keep the sharks, the bloody sharks,

  from the heart.

  waste basket

  spoor and anemia and deviltry

  and what can we make of this?:

  a belly in the trash…

  down by Mr. Saunders’ beer cans

  curled up like a cat;

  life can be no less ludicrous

  than rain

  and as I take the lift

  up to 3

  I pass Mrs. Swanson

  in the grate

  powdered and really dead

  but walking on

  buying sweets and fats

  and mailing Christmas cards;

  and opening the door to my room

  a fat damsel scrambles my vision

  bottles fall

  and a voice says

  why are all your poems

  personal?

  ::: the old movies

  were best, the French F. Legion

  every man with a bitch and the Arabs charging down

  on white parade ponies, and the Sarge’t holding the

  fort by propping up dead men until re’forcemnts arriv’l.

  And the ones with the boys flying around in the Spads

  full of wire and one plat. blonde who seemed to symbolize

  everything. Maybe it was just because I was a kid

  or maybe it isn’t the same any more. All the angles,

  the cautious patriots, the air-raid wardens, cigarettes

  for sex, and even the enemy seeming to play a game.

  Or the time they found the Jap nurse in the shell-hole

  who had been hit in the breast and wanted some sulfa

  and one of the boys said, “Hey, you think we can fuck

  her before she dies?”

  peace

  I thought the dove was the bird of peace

  but here they were shooting them out

  of the brush

  and climbing up the sides of mountains

  and banging them down;

  and everywhere the doves went

  there were the hunters

  blasting and beaming and blasting,

  and one man who didn’t

  in the slightest

  resemble a dove

  was shot in the shoulder;

  and there were many complaints

  that the doves

  were smaller and scarcer

  than last year,

  but the way they fell

  through the air

  when you stung the life

  out of them

  was the same;

  and I was there too

  but I couldn’t shoot anything

  with a paintbrush;

  and a couple of them

  came over to my canvas

  and stood and stood and stood

  until I finally said,

  for God’s sake

  go look at Picasso and Rembrandt,

  go look at Klee and Gauguin,

  listen to a symphony by Mahler,

  and if you get anything

  out of that

  come back

  and stare at my canvas!

  what the hell’s wrong with

  him? the one guy

  said.

  he’s nuts. they’re all nuts,

  the other guy said. anyhow,

  I got my 10 doves.

  me too, his buddy said, let’s

  go home: we can have them

  in the pan

  by 2:30.

  I taste the ashes of your death

  the blossoms shake

  sudden water

  down my sleeve,

  sudden water

  cool and clean

  as snow—

  as the stem-sharp

  swords

  go in

  against your breast

  and the sweet wild

  rocks

  leap over

  and

  lock us in.

  for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough:—

  I pick up the skirt,

  I pick up the sparkling beads

  in black,

  this thing that moved once

  around flesh,

  and I call God a liar,

  I say anything that moved

  like that

  or knew

  my name

  could never die

  in the common verity of dying,

  and I pick

  up her lovely

  dress,

  all her loveliness gone,

  and I speak

  to all the gods,

  Jewish gods, Christ-gods,

  chips of blinking things,

  idols, pills, bread,

  fathoms, risks,

  knowledgeable surrender,

  rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

  without a chance,

  hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

  I lean upon this,

  I lean on all of this

  and I know:

  her dress upon my arm:

  but

  they will not

  give her back to me.

  Uruguay or hell

  it should have been Mexico

  she always liked Mexico

  and Arizona and New Mexico

  and tacos,

  but not the flies

  and so there I was

  standing there—

  durable

  visible

  clothed

  waiting.

  the priest was angry:

  he had been arguing with the boy

  for several days

  over his mother’s right to have a

  Catholic burial

  and they finally settled

  that it could not be in

  church

  but he would say the

  thing at the grave.

  the priest cared about

  technicalities

  the son did not care

  except about the

  bill.

  I was the

  lover

  and I cared but what I cared for

  was dead.

  there were just 3 of

  us: son,

  landlady,

  lover. it was

  hot. the priest waved his words

  in the air and

  then he was

  done. I walked to the

  priest and thanked him for the

  words.

  and we walked

  off

  we got into the car

  we drove away.

  it should have been Mexico

  or Uruguay or hell.

  the son let me out at my

  place and said he’d write me about a

  stone but I knew he was lying—

  that if there was to be a stone

  the lover would

  put it there.

  I went upstairs and turned on the

  radio and pulled down the

  shades.

  notice

  the swans drown in bilge water,

  take down the signs,

  test the poisons,

  barricade the cow

  from the bull,

  the peony from the sun,

  take the lavender kisses from my night,

  put the symphonies out on the streets

  like beggars,

  get the nails ready,

  flog the backs of the saints,

  stun frogs and mice for the cat,

  burn the enthralling paintings,

  piss on the dawn,

  my love

  is dead.

  for Jane

  225 days under grass

  and you know more than I.

  they have long taken your blood,

  you are a dry stic
k in a basket.

  is this how it works?

  in this room

  the hours of love

  still make shadows.

  when you left

  you took almost

  everything.

  I kneel in the nights

  before tigers

  that will not let me be.

  what you were

  will not happen again.

  the tigers have found me

  and I do not care.

  conversation on a telephone

  I could tell by the crouch of the cat,

  the way it was flattened,

  that it was insane with prey;

  and when my car came upon it,

  it rose in the twilight

  and made off

  with bird in mouth,

  a very large bird, gray,

  the wings down like broken love,

  the fangs in,

  life still there

  but not much,

  not very much.

  the broken love-bird

  the cat walks in my mind

  and I cannot make him out:

  the phone rings,

  I answer a voice,

  but I see him again and again,

  and the loose wings

  the loose gray wings,

  and this thing held

  in a head that knows no mercy;

  it is the world, it is ours;

  I put the phone down