Bukowski Quote of the Day

Just to get through the day

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what?

I was already old and hadn't made it as a writer when a young man sitting on my couch asked me, "what do you think of Huxley living up in the Hollywood hills while you live down here?" "I don't think anything about it," I told him. "what do you mean?" he asked. "I mean, I don't think it has anything to do with anything."

now the young man who asked me that question lives up in the hills and I still live down here and I still don't think it has anything to do with anything. especially with writing. but people keep asking foolish  questions,  don't  they?

- The Flash of Lightning behind the Mountain: New Poems, 2004, Ecco. 

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pretenders

nothing is worse than a hopelessly untalented  entertainer.

unlike the talented they have boundless exuberance and no self-doubt.

luckily, for us, we seldom encounter one of them except sometimes at small parties or as entertainers in cheap cafes.

you don't have to actually go to hell to know what hell must be like: just looking at and listening to one of them gives you a good idea.

there seems to be one simple undying rule:

the worse the talent the more they are sure of  it.

- The Flash of Lightning behind the Mountain: New Poems, 2004, Ecco. 

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Charles Bukowski's last poetry reading: the last straw.

march 31, 1980

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the end of an era

parties at my place were always marred by violence: mine. 

it was what attracted them: the would-be writers and the  would-be women.

the writers? the women? I could always hear them buzzing in the far corners:

"when's he going to get mean? he always does!"

at all those parties i enjoyed the beginnings the middles

but as each night unfolded toward morning something somebody  would truly enrage me

and I'd find myself picking up some guy and  hurling him off the front porch:

that was the quickest way to get rid of them.

well,  one particular  night I made up my  mind to see it through to the end without  untoward incident

and I was walking into the kitchen for another drink when I was pounced upon from behind by  Peter the bookstore owner.

this bookstore owner had more mental problems than most of  them

and  as he held me in this excellent choke-hold from the rear his madness gave him superb  strength

and as the milk-brains in the other room babbled on about how to save the world

I was being murdered.

I thought I was finished. 

I saw bright flashes of light.

I could no longer breathe I felt my heart beating and my  temples throb.

like a trapped animal I gave it one last effort

grabbed him  behind the neck bent my back and carried him like that.

rushed into the kitchen ducked my head low at the last  moment and

smashed his skull against the kitchen wall. 

I steadied myself a moment then picked him up and carried him into the other room

and dumped him into the lap of his girlfriend

where from the safety of her  skirts this Peter the bookstore owner came around and began crying (yes, he actually shed tears):

"Hank hurt me! he HURT me! I was only FOOLING!" 

I heard cries of dismay from around the room:

"you're a real bastard,  Chinaski!"

"Peter sells your books, he displays them in the window!"

"Peter LOVES you!" 

"ok," I said, "everybody out! FAST!"

sure enough, they filed out sharing their anger and disgust with one  another.

and  I locked the door then  put out the lights got myself a beer  and sat there in the dark drinking alone. 

and  I liked that so  much that  that's the way I continued to live  from then on. 

there were no more parties.

and  after that the writing got much better

everything got much better because:

you've got to get rid of false friends and bloodsuckers first before they destroy  you.

- The Flash of Lightning behind the Mountain: New Poems, 2004, Ecco. 

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crime does pay

the rooms at the hospital went for $550 a day. that was for the room alone. the amazing thing, though, was that in some of the rooms prisoners were lodged. I saw them chained to their beds, usually by an ankle. $550 a day, plus meals, now that's luxury living -  plus first-rate medical attention and two guards on watch. and here I was with my cancer, walking down the halls in my robe thinking, if I live through this it will take me years to pay off the hospital while the prisoners won't owe a damned thing. not that I didn't have some sympathy for those fellows but when you consider that when something like a bullet in one of your buttocks gets you all that free attention, medical and otherwise, plus no billing later from the hospital business office, maybe I had chosen the wrong occupation?

  - The Flash of Lightning behind the Mountain: New Poems, 2004, Ecco.

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a visitor complains

I "hey, man," he said, "I liked your poems better when you were puking and living with whores and hitting the bars and ending up in the drunk tank and getting into alley fights."

then he went on to talk about and read his own down-to-earth poems.

II what some poets and pundits don't realize is how ridiculous it is to cling forever to the same subject matter.

in time the whores wear thin: their hard vision, their curses, their tiny endearments become more than deadly.

and as for puking you can soon get too much of that especially when it leads to a stinking bed in the charity ward.

and as for alley fights I was never too good a warrior, I was only seeing if I had a touch of courage- I found some, and finding that, there was no further need to explore.

I mean, you can describe a harsh lifestyle in your poems but sooner or later you will find it's time to move on. if you hang on too long the subject matter gets thin and tiresome and, yes, I still love my booze but I can pass on the whores, the bars and the drunk tanks without feeling that I have sold my god-damned soul down the bloody dung-filled river.

some pundits would be delighted if my poems again found me in some skid row alley with face bashed in and the flies swarming the emptiness of me.

some pundits need Van Gogh madness and Mozart suffering to feed on or Dostoevsky with his back to the firing wall. some pundits consider misfortune to be the only viable art- form.

as for Van Gogh, Mozart, Dostoevsky, etc. I say that they did neither choose nor welcome their pain and suffering.

III of course, I didn't tell this to my poet-visitor he was too busy belching and farting and woofing and poofing gurgling the libations I offered him as he read me his own exploits in the almighty gutter which were hardly believable and bordered on farce.

that loud voice those hairy eyebrows that delight in personal misfortune- as if living badly was a triumph and a very proud accomplishment.

his feet planted flat upon my floor he gave me the gut-pain he claimed was so very necessary and grand.

  - The Flash of Lightning behind the Mountain: New Poems, 2004, Ecco.  

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My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

From "Remember Pearl Harbor?" in South of No North, 2003, Ecco.

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It was like any other impossible job, you got tired and you wanted to quit and then you got more tired and forgot to quit, and the minutes didn't move, you lived forever inside of one minute, no hope, no out, trapped, too dumb to quit and nowhere to go if you did quit.

From "A couple of winos" in: South of no north. 2003. Ecco. 

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Excerpt from Bop Bop Against That Curtain

I fought a guy who later ended up very high in the United States Navy. I fought him one day from 8.30 in the morning until after sundown. Nobody stopped us although we were in plain sight of his front lawn, under two huge pepper trees with the sparrows shitting on us all day. 

It was a grim fight, it was to the finish. He was bigger, a little older and heavier, but I was crazier. We quit by common consent - I don't know how this works, you have to experience it to understand it, but after two people beat on each other eight or nine hours a strange kind of brotherhood emerges.

The next day my body was entirely blue. I couldn't speak out of my lips or move any part of myself without pain. I was on the bed getting ready to die and my mother came in with the shirt I'd worn during the fight. She held it in front of my face over the bed and she said, "Look, you got bloodspots on this shirt! Bloodspots!"

"Sorry!" "I'll never get them out! NEVER!!" "They're his bloodspots." "It doesn't matter! It's blood! It doesn't come out!"

  - South of No North, 2003 Ecco. 

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Nirvana

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a correspondent wrote bitterly:

"in your last book you had 43 poems which either talked about death directly or referred to it in an oblique manner..."

I folded his letter neatly and placed it on the  pile with the others

and like the dead I didn't reply.

- The Continual Condition, 2009 Ecco. 

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it's easier to write a symphony than it is to love and respect your neighbour

From "as Buddha smiles", in The Continual Condition, 2009 Ecco. 

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the recess bells of school

my father's feet stank and his smile was like a  pile of dog shit. whenever I noticed the brisk hard stubble hairs of his beard left in the bathroom basin sickening thoughts would enter my skull, I'd sense arcades fat with fools forever.

to be the very blood of that hated blood made the windows intolerable, and the music and the flowers and the trees ugly. but one lives: suicide before the age of ten is rare.

brutal were the calla lillies brutal the nectar and the kiss brutal the recess bells of school. brutal the softball games brutal soccer and volleyball. the skies were white and high, and I'd look at the faces of the game players and they were strangely masked.

now I eat in cafes attend concerts live with women gamble drink trim hedges buy automobiles have friends and pets; I attend weddings funerals boxing matches, I pay a fair share of taxes, I stand in line at supermarkets, I clean my fingernails, I cut the long hair out of my nostrils, I take sunbaths, I repair damage, I attempt not to offend, I laugh, I listen to the viewpoint of enemies, I telephone plumbers and lawyers, I get towed in from freeway breakdowns, I get my teeth cleaned, I search for heroes, I go blind when I look too long at the sun.

my father's feet stank and his smile was like a pile of dog shit.

everywhere it's all the same. 

- The Continual Condition, 2009 Ecco. 

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let's have some fun

there will always be people who say, let's go on a boat or let's go to Argentina or let's go to a movie or let's go to a tennis match or let's visit my sister or how about a picnic? and I don't understand any of this because to me just walking across the room is like walking through flames and the first strange face I see each day adds a knot to my stomach and I don't have the time because I haven't paid the gas bill or checked the air in my tires and one of my teeth is aching (on the left side) and I've received several letters in the mail from crazies and there's a notice from the government about a tax matter and I need an oil change (and my car needs one too). 

there's a fellow down the street and he just sits on his porch. there are people who just sit a lifetime with unblinking eyes.

these could be the wise ones. I am not one of the wise ones. I even fight dragons in the dungeons of my sleep.

so if you want to send me to an early hell then force me to spend an entire day at Disneyland. 

- The Continual Condition, 2009 Ecco. 

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In the old days . . . writers' lives were more interesting than their writing. Now-a-days neither the lives nor the writing is interesting.

Pulp, 2009 Virgin Books

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Dinosauria, we

born like this into this as the chalk faces smile as Mrs. Death laughs as the elevators break as political landscapes dissolve as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree as the oily fish spit out their oily prey as the sun is masked

we are born like this into this into these carefully mad wars into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness into bars where people no longer speak to each other into fish fights that end as shootings and killings

born into this into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

born into this walking and living through this dying because of this muted because of this castrated debauched disinherited because of this fooled by this used by this pissed on by this made crazy and sick by this made violent made inhuman by this

the heart is blackened the fingers reach for the throat the gun the knife the bomb the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god

the fingers reach for the bottle the pill the powder

we are born into this sorrowful deadliness we are born into a government 60 years in debt that soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt and the banks will burn money will be useless there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets it will be guns and roving mobs land will be useless food will become a diminishing return nuclear power will be taken over by the many explosions will continually shake the earth radiated robot men will stalk each other the rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms Dante's Inferno will be made to look like children's playground

the sun will not be seen and it will always be night trees will die all vegetation will die radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men the sea will be poisoned the lakes and rivers will vanish rain will be the new gold

the rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

the last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases and the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition the petering out of supplies the natural effect of general decay and there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

born out of that.

the sun still hidden there

awaiting the next chapter.

- Run with the Hunted, 2003 Ecco. 

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my first computer poem

have I gone the way of the deathly death? will this machine finish me where booze and women and poverty have not?

is Whitman laughing at me from his grave? does Creeley care?

is this properly spaced? am I?

will Ginsberg howl?

soothe me!

get me lucky!

get me good!

get me going!

I am a virgin again.

a 70-year-old virgin.

don't fuck me, machine

do. who cares?

talk to me, machine!

we can drink together. we can have fun.

think of all the people who will hate me at this computer.

we'll add them to the others and continue right on.

so this is the beginning not the end. 

- Run with the Hunted, 2003 Ecco.