On Love. Charles Bukowski
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shoes alone right now,
and other shoes with other shoes
like dogs walking avenues,
and smoke alone is not enough
and I got a letter from a woman in a hospital,
love, she says, love,
more poems,
but I do not write,
I do not understand myself,
she sends me photographs of the hospital
taken from the air,
but I remember her on other nights,
not dying,
shoes with spikes like daggers
sitting next to mine,
how these strong nights
can lie to the hills,
how these nights become quite finally
my shoes in the closet
flown by overcoats and awkward shirts,
and I look into the hole the door leaves
and the walls, and I do not
write.
a real thing, a good woman
they are always writing about the bulls, the bullfighters,
those who have never seen them,
and as I break the webs of the spiders reaching for my wine
the umhum of bombers, gd.dmn hum breaking the solace,
and I must write a letter to my priest about some 3rd. st. whore
who keeps calling me up at 3 in the morning;
up the old stairs, ass full of splinters,
thinking of pocket-book poets and the priest,
and I’m over the typewriter like a washing machine,
and look look the bulls are still dying
and they are razing them raising them
like wheat in the fields,
and the sun’s black as ink, black ink that is,
and my wife says Brock, for Christ’s sake,
the typewriter all night,
how can I sleep? and I crawl into bed and
kiss her hair sorry sorry sorry
sometimes I get excited I don’t know why
friend of mine said he was going to write about
Manolete . . .
who’s that? nobody, kid, somebody dead
like Chopin or our old mailman or a dog,
go to sleep, go to sleep,
and I kiss her and rub her head,
a good woman,
and soon she sleeps and I wait
for morning.
one night stand
the latest hardware dangling upon my pillow catches
window lamplight through the mist of alcohol.
I was the whelp of a prude who whipped me when
the wind shook blades of grass the eye could see
move and
you were a
convent girl watching the nuns shake loose
the Las Cruces sand from God’s robes.
you are
yesterday’s
bouquet so sadly
raided. I kiss your poor
breasts as my hands reach for love
in this cheap Hollywood apartment smelling of
bread and gas and misery.
we move through remembered routes
the same old steps smooth with hundreds of
feet, 50 loves, 20 years.
and we are granted a very small summer, and
then it’s
winter again
and you are moving across the floor
some heavy awkward thing
and the toilet flushes, a dog barks
a car door slams . . .
it’s gotten inescapably away, everything,
it seems, and I light a cigarette and
await the oldest curse
of all.
the mischief of expiration
I am, at best, the delicate thought of a delicate hand
that quenches for the mixing rope, and when
beneath the love of flowers I am still,
as the spider drinks the greening hour—
strike gray bells of drinking,
let a frog say
a voice is dead,
let the beasts from the pantry
and the days that have hated this,
the contrary wives of unblinking grief,
plains of small surrender
between Mexicali and Tampa;
hens gone, cigarettes smoked, loaves sliced,
and lest this be taken for wry sorrow:
put the spider in wine,
tap the thin skull sides that held poor lightning,
make it less than a treacherous kiss,
put me down for dancing
you much more dead,
I am a dish for your ashes,
I am a fist for your air.
the most immense thing about beauty
is finding it gone.
love is a form of selfishness
pither, the eustachian tube and the green bugdead ivy
and the way we walked tonight
with the sky climbing on our ears and in our pockets
while we talked of things that didn’t matter
and the streetcar rocked and howled its color
which we didn’t notice except as a thing beside the eve
as we mentioned sex through palsies,
pither, the red fire, pither the eustachian tube!
gone are the days, gone is the green bugdead ivy
and the words we said tonight that didn’t matter;
X 12, Cardinal and Gold
GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD!
your eyes are gold
your hair is gold
your love is gold
your grave is gold
and the streets go