The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

by Charles Bukowski

  going on—

  I’d rather watch a beetle crawl the sick

  powdered dust of

  earth—

  while you are aware of my

  cold handshake and

  my cigar more alive than my

  eyes, my

  wit dimmer than

  last Fall’s sunlight.

  but, Christ, friends—

  the luger, the mortar, the patchwork

  as I gape out at you from a

  porkchop mouth—

  take me as Caesar was taken

  or

  Joan of Arc

  or

  the man who fell off the fire escape drunk

  or

  the suicide at Bellevue

  or Van Gogh confused with

  ravens

  and the atomic yellow.

  I hold everything away from myself

  so that you may become

  real and shaking and stemmed

  and ascending and blue and buttermilk

  as the chorus girls kick out,

  flags wave,

  the eagle sinks into the sea,

  as

  our dirty time is just about

  served and done.

  I Write This Upon the Last Drink’s Hammer

  grief-tailed fish,

  Sunday-eye in walking shorts

  with staff,

  motorcades in honor of the roots

  of trees,

  the rain like a young girl

  walking toward me,

  the houses waving like flags

  filled with drunken hymns,

  the bulls of Spain

  the bulls of Spain

  winning

  unpracticed as leaves

  as alone as shrimp upon a sea-bottom

  or if this is wrong

  as alone as what is there,

  as my love

  an old woman with rouged cheeks

  skips rope again

  as Hemingway’s fingers live again

  tough and terrible and good,

  as Kid Gavilan once again flurries

  like hyacinths into Spring,

  I am sad I am sad I am sad

  that the tongue and teeth will eat us

  must choose so many good

  like these fingers of lilies into the brain

  sock out light

  to those of us who sit in dark rooms alone

  on Monday mornings

  while presidents speak of honor and culture

  and dedication;

  or orange moon of moaning

  that my voice speaks like slivers through a broken

  face,

  all this time I’ve seen through the bottoms of bottles

  and black oil wells pumping their stinking arms

  ramming home to the core of a rose

  split into shares split into dividends

  that tinkle less than the grunt of a frog,

  I am hammered home not upon wisdom

  but upon defamation:

  old cars in junk yards,

  old men playing checkers in the park,

  women putting a price upon the curve of leg and breast,

  men going to education like a bank account

  or a high-priced whore to accompany them to a symphony,

  one-third of the world starving while

  I am indecent enough to worry about my own death

  like some monkey engrossed with his flea,

  I am sad because my manliness chokes me down

  to the nakedness of revulsion

  when there is so little time to understand,

  I am sad because my drink is running low

  and I must either visit people who drink

  or go to storekeepers

  with a poem they will never print,

  strings of an avant-garde symphony

  upon my radio,

  somebody driving a knife through the everywhere cotton

  but only meaning

  that he protests dying,

  and I have seen the dead

  like figs upon a board

  and my heart gone bad

  breaking from the brain and reason

  left with only

  the season of

  love

  and

  the question:

  why?

  that Wagner is dead say

  is bad enough

  to me

  only

  or that Van Gogh

  does not see the strings and puddles

  of this day,

  this is not so good,

  or the fact that

  those I have known to touch

  I am no longer able to touch;

  I am a madman who sits in the front row

  of burlesque shows and musical comedies

  sucking up the light and song and dance

  like a child

  upon the straw of an icecream soda,

  but I walk outside

  and the heinous men

  the steel men

  who believe in the privacy of a wallet

  and cement

  and chosen occasions only

  Christmas New Year’s the 4th of July

  to attempt to manifest a life

  that has lain in a drawer like a single glove

  that is brought out like a fist:

  too much and too late.

  I have seen men in North Carolina mountains

  posing as priests when they had not even

  become men yet

  and I have seen men in odd places

  like bars and jails

  good men who posed nothing

  because they knew that posing was false

  that the blackbird the carnation the dollar bill in the palm

  the poem for rested people with 30 dollar curtains plus

  time for flat and meaningless puzzles,

  they knew the poem the knife

  the curving blueing cock of Summer

  that all the love that hands could hold

  would go would go

  and that the needs for knicknacks and gestures

  was done

  o fire hold me in these rooms

  o copper kettle boil,

  the small dogs run the streets,

  carpenters sneeze,

  the barber’s pole itches

  to melt in the sun,

  come o kind wind of black car

  as I cross Normandy Avenue

  in a sun gone blue

  like ruptured filaments of a battered suitcase,

  to see where you are to see where you have gone

  I enter the store of a knowing Jew, my friend,

  and argue for another bottle

  for him

  and

  for me

  for

  all

  of

  us.

  Poem for Liz

  the bumblebee

  is less than a stack of

  potato chips,

  and growling and groaning

  through barbs

  searchlight shining into eyes,

  I think of the good whore

  who wouldn’t even

  take god damn easy money

  and when you slipped it into her purse

  she’d find it

  and slap it back

  like the worst of insults,

  but she saved you from the law

  and your own razor

  only meant to shave with

  to find her dead later

  in a three-dollar-and-fifty-cent-a-week room,

  stiff as anything can stiffen,

  never having complained

  starved and laughing

  only wanting one more drink

  and one less man

  only wanting one small child

  as any woman would

  coming across the kitchen floor toward her,

  everything done up in ribbons and sunshine,r />
  and when the man next to the barstool

  that stood next to mine

  heard about Liz

  he said,

  “Too bad, god damn, she was a fine piece.”

  No wonder a whore is a whore.

  Liz, I know, and although I’d like to see you

  now

  I’m glad

  you’re dead.

  A Nice Place

  It isn’t easy running through the halls

  lights out trying to find a door

  with the jelly law

  pounding behind you like the dead,

  then #303 and in, chain on,

  and now they rattle and roar,

  then argue gently,

  then plead,

  but fortunately

  the landlord would rather have his door

  up than me down

  in jail…

  “…he’s drunk in there

  with some woman. I’ve warned him,

  I don’t allow such things,

  this is a nice place, this is…”

  soon they go away;

  you’d think I never paid the rent;

  you’d think they’d allow a man to drink

  and sit with a woman and watch the sun

  come up.

  I uncap the new bottle

  from the bag and she sits in the corner

  smoking and coughing

  like an old Aunt from New Jersey.

  Insomnia

  have you ever been in a room

  on top of 32 people sleeping

  on the floors below,

  only you are not sleeping,

  you are listening to the engines

  and horns that never stop,

  you are thinking of minotaurs,

  you are thinking of Segovia

  who practices 5 hours a day

  or the graves

  that need no practice,

  and your feet twist in the sheets

  and you look down at a hand

  that could easily belong to a man

  of 80, and you

  are on top of 32 people sleeping

  and you know that most of them

  will awaken

  to yawn and eat and empty trash,

  perhaps defecate,

  but right now they are yours,

  riding your minotaurs

  breathing fiery hailstones of song,

  or mushroom breathing:

  skulls flat as coffins,

  all lovers parted,

  and you rise and light a cigarette,

  evidently,

  still alive.

  Wrong Number

  the foreign hands and feet that tear my window shades,

  the masses that shape before my face and ogle

  and picture me relegated to their damned cage

  failed and locked

  quite finally in;…

  the fires are preparing the burnt flowers of my hills,

  the wall-eyed butcher spits

  and flaunts his blade

  backed by law, dullness and admiration—

  how the girls rejoice in him: he has no doubts,

  he has nothing

  and it gives him strength

  like a bell clanging against the defenseless air…

  there is no church for me,

  no sanctuary; no God, no love, no roses to rust;

  towers are only skeletons of misfit reason,

  and the sea waits

  as the land waits,

  amused and perfect;

  carefully, I call voices on the phone,

  measuring their sounds for humanity and laughter;

  somewhere I am cut off, contact fails;

  I return the receiver

  and return also

  to the hell of my undoing, to the looming

  larks eating my wallpaper

  and curving fat and fancy in the bridgework

  of my tub,

  and waiting against my will

  against music and rest and color

  against the god of my heart

  where I can feel the undoing of my soul

  spinning away like a thread

  on a quickly revolving spool.

  When the Berry Bush Dies I’ll Swim Down the Green River with My Hair on Fire

  the insistent resolution like

  the rosebud or the anarchist

  is eventually

  wasted

  like moths in towers

  or bathing beauties in

  New Jersey.

  the buses sotted with people

  take them through the streets of

  evening where Christ

  forgot to weep

  as I move down move down

  to dying

  behind pulled windowshades

  like a man who has been gassed or stoned

  or insulted by the days.

  there goes a rat stuck with love,

  there goes a man in dirty underwear,

  there go bowels like a steam roller,

  there goes the left guard for Notre Dame in

  1932, and like Whitman

  I have these things:

  I am a face behind a window

  a toothache

  an eater of parsley

  a parallel man staring at ceilings of night

  a heaver of gas

  an expeller of poisons

  smaller than God and not nearly as sure

  a bleeder when cut

  a lover when lucky

  a man when born.

  there’s much more and much less.

  at 6 o’clock they start coming in like the

  sea or the evening paper, and like the leaves of the

  berry bush outside they are a little sadder now,

  inch by inch now it’s speckled with brown and falling leaves,

  day by day it gets worse like a wart haggled with a pin;

  my shades are down as the scientists decide how

  to get to Mars,

  how to get out of

  here. it is evening, it is time to eat a pie, it is time for

  music.

  Whitman lies there like a sandcrab like a frozen

  turtle and I get up and walk across

  the room.

  Face While Shaving

  So what is a body but a man

  caught inside

  for a little while?

  staring into a mirror,

  recognizing the vegetable clerk

  or a design on wallpaper;

  it is not vanity that seeks reflection

  but dumb ape wonder;

  but still the reflection…

  movement of arm and muscle, shell-head,

  a face staring down through the

  stale dimension of dreams

  as a Mississippi coed powders her nose

  and paints a lavender kiss;

  the phone rings like a plea

  and the razor breaks through the snow,

  the dead roses, the dead moths,

  sunset after sunset,

  steam and Christ and darkness,

  one tiny inch of light.

  9 Rings

  the simple misery of survival

  the tyranny of ancient rules

  and new deaths,

  the coming of the beetle-winged

  enemy

  chanting, cursing

  bits of blood and grit;

  I slam my fingers

  in the window

  as the phone rings.

  I count 9 rings

  and then it stops;

  some voice it was

  to test my reality

  when I have no reality,

  when I am water

  walking around bone

  in a green room.

  I would burn the swans

  in their lake,

  I would send messengers

  to the mountaintop

  to razz the clouds.

&nb
sp; she was getting to be a

  dull lay

  anyway.

  Somebody Always Breaking My Dainty Solitude…

  hey man! somebody yells down to me through my broken

  window,

  ya wanna go down to the taco stand?

  hell, no!

  I scream from down on the floor.

  why not? he asks.

  I yell back, who are you?

  none of us knows who we are, he states, I just thot maybe you

  wanted to go down to the taco

  stand.

  please go away.

  no, I’m comin’ in.

  listen, friend, I’ve got a foot of salami

  here and the first fink that walks in,

  he’s gonna get it in the side of his

  head!

  don’t mess with me, he answers, my mother played halfback for

  St. Purdy High for half-a-year before somebody found her

  squatting over one of the

  urinals.

  oh yeah, well, I’ve got bugs in my hair, mice and fish in

  my pockets and Charles Atlas is in my bathroom

  shining my mirror.

  with that, he leaves.

  I get up, brush the beercans off my chest

  and yell at Atlas to get the humping hell out of there,

  I’ve got

  business.

  Thank God for Alleys

  hummingbird make yr mark he said and then something about

  an arab and a son of a bitch and I hit him in the mouth and

  we fought in the snow for ten minutes spotting it with red

  blossoms—breathing is a blade—and I kept thinking of astronauts

  up there circling the earth like a rowboat around a pond

  all out of trouble and in trouble, and we finally stopped

  or somebody or something stopped us and we went into Harry’s

  for a drink and the place was empty and Harry kept looking