CHARLES BUKOWSKI
MOCKINGBIRD WISH ME LUCK
for Linda King
for all the good reasons
Table of Contents
I.
a free 25 page booklet
the smoking car
the world’s greatest loser
the garbageman
girl in a miniskirt reading the bible
moyamensing prison:
notes upon the flaxen aspect:
funhouse
another academy
a day at the oak tree meet
rain
the colored birds
another lousy 10 percenter
making it
drunk ol’ bukowski drunk
the poetry reading
slim killers
the last days of the suicide kid
bang bang
5 men in black passing my window
the poet’s muse
somebody
story and poem
and the moon and the stars and the world
get the nose
my landlady and my landlord
bad night
hogs in the sky
the white poets
the black poets
millionaires
poetry
the painter
the inquisitor
my friend william
300 poems
lifting weights at 2 a.m.
reality
earthquake
the good life at o’hare airport
the golfers
II.
the mockingbird
ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha
a fine day and the world looks good
vacancy
3:16 and one half…
the rat
hot
radio
ariel
the passing of a dark gray moment
consummation of grief
those sons of bitches
the hunt
the big fire
ww 2
ants
he wrote in lonely blood
six chink fishermen
burning
a sound in the brush
the wild
4th of july
carnival
99 degrees
happy new year
the shoelace
chilled green
life
III.
american matador
I saw an old-fashioned whore today
poem for barbara, poem for jane
short order
the dwarf
merry christmas
marina
one with dante
an interesting night
a threat to my immortality
climax
a man’s woman
tight pink dress
more or less, for julie
this is the way it goes and goes and goes
left with the dog
praying for a best seller
that one
have you ever kissed a panther?
2 carnations
man and woman in bed at ten p.m.
the answer
a split
power failure
snake in the watermelon
style
the shower
if we take—
About the Author
Other Books by Charles Bukowski
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
I
the world is full of shipping clerks
who have read
the Harvard Classics
a free 25 page booklet
dying for a beer dying
for and of life
on a windy afternoon in Hollywood
listening to symphony music from my little red radio
on the floor.
a friend said,
“all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk
and lay down
somebody will pick you up
somebody will take care of you.”
I look out the window at the sidewalk
I see something walking on the sidewalk
she wouldn’t lay down there,
only in special places for special people with special $$$$
and
special ways
while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in
Hollywood,
nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the
sidewalk
moving it past your famished window
she’s dressed in the finest cloth
she doesn’t care what you say
how you look what you do
as long as you do not get in her
way, and it must be that she doesn’t shit or
have blood
she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.
I am too sick to lay down
the sidewalks frighten me
the whole damned city frightens me,
what I will become
what I have become
frightens me.
ah, the bravado is gone
the big run through center is gone
on a windy afternoon in Hollywood
my radio cracks and spits its dirty music
through a floor full of empty beerbottles.
now I hear a siren
it comes closer
the music stops
the man on the radio says,
“we will send you a free 25 page booklet:
FACE THE FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE COSTS.”
the siren fades into the cardboard mountains
and I look out the window again as the clasped fist of
boiling cloud comes down—
the wind shakes the plants outside
I wait for evening I wait for night I wait sitting in a chair
by the window—
the cook drops in the live
red-pink salty
rough-tit crab and
the game works
on
come get me.
the smoking car
they stop out front here
it looks as if the car is on fire
the smoke blazes blue from the hood and exhaust
the motor sounds like cannon shots
the car humps wildly
one guy gets out,
Jesus, he says, he takes a long drink from a
canvas water bag
and gives the car an eerie look.
the other guy gets out and looks at the car,
Jesus, he says,
and he takes a drink from a pint of whiskey,
then passes the bottle to his
friend.
they both stand and look at the car,
one holding the whiskey, the other the water bag.
they are not dressed in conventional hippie garb
but in natural old clothes
faded, dirty and torn.
a butterfly goes past my window
and they get back in the
car
and it bucks off in low
like a rodeo bronc
they are both laughing
and one has the bottle
tilted…
the butterfly is gone
and outside there is a globe of smoke
40 feet in circumference.
first human beings I’ve seen in Los Angeles
in 15 years.
the world’s greatest loser
he used to sell papers in front:
“Get your winners! Get rich on a dime!”
and about the 3rd or 4th race
with roller skates underneath.
he’d propel himself along on his hands;
he just had small stumps for legs
and the rims of the skate wheels were worn off.
you could see inside the wheels and they would wobble
something awful
shooting and flashing
imperialistic sparks!
he moved faster than anybody, rolled cigarette dangling,
you could hear him coming
“god o mighty, what was that?” the new ones asked.
he was the world’s greatest loser
but he never gave up
wheeling toward the 2 dollar window screaming:
“IT’S THE 4 HORSE, YOU FOOLS! HOW THE HELL YA
GONNA BEAT THE
4?”
up on the board the 4 would be reading
60 to one.
I never heard him pick a winner.
they say he slept in the bushes. I guess that’s where he
died. he’s not around any
more.
there was the big fat blonde whore
who kept touching him for luck, and
laughing.
nobody had any luck. the whore is gone
too.
I guess nothing ever works for us. we’re fools, of course—
bucking the inside plus a 15 percent take,
but how are you going to tell a dreamer
there’s a 15 percent take on the
dream? he’ll just laugh and say,
is that all?
I miss those
sparks.
the garbageman
we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts
the garbageman said
dropping to one knee
and blowing the head away from the priest’s
neck
and as the green bus stopped at the corner
a cripple got out and a witch and a little girl
with a flower.
we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts
the garbageman said
and he shot the cripple and the witch
but did not fire at the little girl,
then he ran down an alley
and climbed up on the roof of a garage,
reloaded
as the Goodyear Blimp sailed overhead
he pumped 6 shots, saying,
here are some unsolicited manuscripts,
and the blimp wavered, paused,
then began to nose down as 2 men parachuted
out
saying Hail Marys.
8 squad cars entered the area
and began to surround the garage
and the garbageman said,
we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts
and he got one cop,
and then they really began firing.
the garbageman stood up in the center of the sky,
threw his loaded rifle at them
and all the shells
and he said,
we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts,
and the first bullet got him in the chest,
spun him,
another in the back, one in the neck, and
he fell on top of the garage roof,
the blood rolling out on the tarpaper,
blood like syrup blood like honey blood like blood,
he said,
Holy Mary, we do not accept…
girl in a miniskirt reading the bible outside my window
Sunday. I am eating a
grapefruit. church is over at the Russian
Orthodox to the
west.
she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rhythmic dance
reading the Bible…
long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long young legs warm in the sun…
there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to…
my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rhythms of the
symphony…
she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.
I am God.
moyamensing prison:
we shot craps in the exercise yard while the
dummies played ball with a torn-up shirt
wound into a ball
once or twice a day we had to break it up
under a tommy gun from the tower—
some blank-faced screw pointing it at
us, but,
by god, through it we somehow played
and through some skill and
luck
I soon had all the money in the yard.
and in the morning and in the days that followed—
the screws, the sparrows, the shivs, the dips, the
strongarms, the looneys, the hustlers, the freaks,
the discarded dream-presidents of America, the cook,
in fact, all my critics, they all called me
“Mr. Bukowski,” a kind of fleeting immortality
I guess,
but real as hogs’ heads or dead flowers,
and the force of it
got to me there:
“Mr. Bukowski,” ace-crapshooter,
money-man in a world of almost no
money.
immortality.
I didn’t recite them Shelley, no,
and everything came to me after lights out:
slim-hipped boys I didn’t want
steaks and ice cream and cigars which I did
want, and
shaving cream, new razorblades, the latest copy of the
New Yorker.
what greater immortality than Heaven in Hell,
and I continued to enjoy it until they
threw me out on the streets
back to my typewriter,
innocent, lazy, frightened and mortal
again.
notes upon the flaxen aspect:
a John F. Kennedy flower knocks upon my door and is
shot through the neck;
the gladiolas gather by the dozens around the tip of
India
dripping into Ceylon;
dozens of oysters read Germaine Greer.
meanwhile, I itch from the slush of the Philippines
to the eye of the minnow
the minnow being eaten by the cumulative dreams of
Simon Bolivar. O,
freedom from the limitation of angular distance would be
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck Page 1