Poems Charles Bukowski Quotes

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

people run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

so it's always a process of letting go, one way or another

I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.

regret is mostly caused by not having done anything.

animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. neither do I. maybe that's why we get along

The Laughing Heart your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.

Beware Those Who Are ALWAYS READING BOOKS

Our disappointment sits between us.

I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

when I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns

you've got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you've got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you've got to starve like a winter alleycat, you've go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment.

having nothing to struggle against they have nothing to struggle for.

Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don't hear when your back is turned.

people diminish me; the longer I sit and listen to them the more empty I feel but I don't get the idea that they feel empty, I feel that they enjoy the sound from their mouths.

the worst thing," he told me, "is bitterness, people end up so bitter.

be it peace or happiness let it enfold you

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets ... are interesting?

and love is a word used too much and much too soon.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

when we were kids laying around the lawn on our bellies we often talked about how we'd like to die and we all agreed on the same thing; we'd all like to die fucking (although none of us had done any fucking) and now that we are hardly kids any longer we think more about how not to die and although we're ready most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have fucked our lives away.

girls please give your bodies and your lives to the young men who deserve them besides there is no way I would welcome the intolerable dull senseless hell you would bring me and I wish you luck in bed and out but not in mine thank you.

she wasn't very interesting but few people are.

there's no clarity. there was never meant to be clarity.

and love was lightning and remembrance

I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.

people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.

the gods seldom give but so quickly take.

I paid, got up, walked to the door, opened it. I heard the man say, "that guy's nuts." out on the street I walked north feeling curiously honored.

she slammed the door and was gone. I looked at the closed door and at the doorknob and strangely I didn't feel alone.

it does seem the more we drink the better the words go.

the price of creation is never too high. the price of living with other people always is.

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.

It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

There is no hurry. Time means nothing to you.

I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.

but isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

sometimes it's hard to know what to do.

we sat there smoking cigarettes at 5 in the morning.

sometimes when everything seems at its worst when all conspires and gnaws and the hours, days, weeks years seem wasted – stretched there upon my bed in the dark looking upward at the ceiling i get what many will consider an obnoxious thought: it’s still nice to be Bukowski.

I feel no grief for being called something which I am not; in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good back rub

great books are the ones we need

And it seems people should not build houses anymore it seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floors under electric lights without shades; it seems there is a lot to forget and a lot not to do and in drugstores, markets, bars, the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at night and look through this house and the house does not want to be built

I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

the gods play no favorites.

now it’s computers and more computers and soon everybody will have one, 3-year-olds will have computers and everybody will know everything about everybody else long before they meet them. nobody will want to meet anybody else ever again and everybody will be a recluse like I am now.

you are alone, Chinaski, and below the stage the seats are empty. the theatre is dark. why do you keep acting? what a bad habit.

Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing.

well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.

i am with the roots of flowers entwined, entombed sending up my passionate blossoms as a flight of rockets and argument; wine churls my throat, above me feet walk upon my brain, monkies fall from the sky clutching photographs of the planets, but i seek only music and the leisure of my pain

darkness falls upon Humanity and faces become terrible things that wanted more than there was. all our days are marked with unexpected affronts - some disastrous, others less so but the process is wearing and continuous. attrition rules. most give way leaving empty spaces where people should be. and now as we ready to self-destruct there is very little left to kill which makes the tragedy less and more much much more.

I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.

I was so thin I could slice bread with my shoulderblades, only I seldom had bread

Angels, we have grown apart.

I found the best thing I could do was just to type away at my own work and let the dying die as they always have.

you are yesterday's bouquet so sadly raided

Ya got cigarettes?” she asks. “Yes,” I say, “I got cigarettes.” “Matches?” she asks. “Enough to burn Rome.” “Whiskey?” “Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River of pain.” “You drunk?” “Not yet.

all theories like cliches shot to hell, all these small faces looking up beautiful and believing; I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but believe is a graveyard. we have narrowed it down to the butcherknife and the mockingbird wish us luck.

Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have love

I don't know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else say like looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. then you forget it and you're back again.

Love is not a candle burning down. Life is. And love and life are not the same or else Love, having choice, nobody would ever die.

I will put on my shoes and shirt and get out of here - it'll be better for all of us.

I knew that I was dying. Something in me said, Go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept. Then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest bit. It needn't be much, just a spark. A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.

I see a bright portion under the overhead light that shades into darkness and then into darker darkness and I can't see beyond that.

as long as there are human beings about there is never going to be any peace for any individual upon this earth (or anywhere else they might escape to). all you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes here or maybe an hour there. something is working toward you right now, and I mean you and nobody but you.

how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?

the world is better without them. only the plants and the animals are true comrades. I drink to them and with them.

I'm only interested in poetry.

How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

most days go nowhere but the avoidance of pain and dissolution are lovely.

all people start to come apart finally and there it is: just empty ashtrays in a room or wisps of hair on a comb in the dissolving moonlight.

it is so dark now with the sadness of people they were tricked, they were taught to expect the ultimate when nothing is promised now young girls weep alone in small rooms old men angrily swing their canes at visions as ladies comb their hair as ants search for survival history surrounds us and our lives slink away in shame.

when I was a boy I used to dream of becoming the village idiot. I used to lie in bed and imagine myself the happy idiot able to get food easily ...and easy sympathy, a planned confusion of not too much love or effort. some would claim that I have succeeded.

from the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.

when you're young a pair of female high-heeled shoes just sitting alone in the closet can fire your bones; when you're old it's just a pair of shoes without anybody in them and just as well.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sound against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love.

when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric” I know what he meant I know what he wanted: to be completely alive every moment in spite of the inevitable. we can’t cheat death but we can make it work so hard that when it does take us it will have known a victory just as perfect as ours

the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries.

I'll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.

You were destroyed by what you befriended.

Don't you go to the movies?" "Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.

one doesn't even think of the liver and if the liver doesn't think of us, that's fine.

about our argument tonight whatever it was about and no matter how unhappy it made us feel remember that there is a cat somewhere adjusting to the space of itself with a delightful wonderment of easiness. in other words magic persists without us no matter what we do against it.

then sit down and write or stand up and write but write no matter what the other people are doing, no matter what they will do to you.

a life can change in a tenth of a second. or sometimes it can take 70 years.

I could never accept life as it was, I could never gobble down all its poisons bu there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.

when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away.

that your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)

unaccountably we are alone forever alone and it was meant to be that way, it was never meant to be any other way– and when the death struggle begins the last thing I wish to see is a ring of human faces hovering over me– better just my old friends, the walls of my self, let only them be there. I have been alone but seldom lonely. I have satisfied my thirst at the well of my self and that wine was good, the best I ever had, and tonight sitting staring into the dark I now finally understand the dark and the light and everything in between. peace of mind and heart arrives when we accept what is: having been born into this strange life we must accept the wasted gamble of our days and take some satisfaction in the pleasure of leaving it all behind. cry not for me. grieve not for me. read what I’ve written then forget it all. drink from the well of your self and begin again. Mind and Heart

I can see where creation often stops while the body still lives and often does not care to. the death of life before life dies.

sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.

the sea is made of blood

Sweet Christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.

I knew exactly what I was doing: I was doing nothing. because I knew there was nothing to do.

nothing's news. it's the same old thing in disguise. only one thing comes without a disguise and you only see it once, or maybe never. like getting hit by a freight train. makes us realize that all our moaning about long lost girls in gingham dresses is not so important after all.

death is walking up and down this room smoking my cigars taking hits of my wine

you've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her,and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.

your best men are drunks and your worst men are locking them up, your best men are killers and your worst men are selling them bullets

I didn't know who to believe but one thing I do know: when a man is living many claim relationships that are hardly so and after he dies, well, then it's everybody's party.

I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, "you shouldn't have done that." and the soldier said, "FUCK THAT GUY!" which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did.

a bird no one wants. he’s mine. my bird of pain. he doesn’t sing. that bird swaying on the bough.

I am a joke told again.

if I had a book or a drink then I didn’t think too much of other things—fools create their own paradise.

humanity you sick motherfucker.

of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse

The dead do not need aspirin or sorrow, I suppose. but they might need rain. not shoes but a place to walk. not cigarettes, they tell us, but a place to burn. or we're told: space and a place to fly might be the same. the dead don't need me. nor do the living. but the dead might need each other. in fact, the dead might need everything we need and we need so much if we only knew what it was. it is probably everything and we will all probably die trying to get it or die because we don't get it. I hope you will understand when I am dead I got as much as possible.

I care for you, darling, I love you, the only reason I fucked L. is because you fucked Z. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N. and because you fucked N. I had to fuck Y. But I think of you constantly, I feel you here in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it, no matter what happens I'd call it love, and so you fucked C. and then before I could move you fucked W., so I had to fuck D. But I want you to know that I love you, I think of you constantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybody like I love you.

Writing is its own intoxication.

(the whole world is at the throat of the world, everybody feels angry, short-changed, cheated, everybody is despondent, disillusioned.) I welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards of happiness.

we are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecue we are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted we are an unwanted burning as we sizzle and fry to the bone the coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneath us and above the sky is an open hand and the words of wise men are useless it's not a nice world, a nice world it's not ...

don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it.

being alone you decided, was a magnificent miracle. nothing else made any sense at all. —escape

alone tonight in this house, alone with 6 cats who tell me without effort all that there is to know.

restless days and sleepless nights always fighting with all your heart and soul so as not to fail at living

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. ("Writing," New Poems Book Three)

the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.

What is your advice to young writers?" "Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes." "What is your advice to older writers?" "If you're still alive, you don't need any advice." "What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?" "What makes you take a shit?

anything, compared to the people, is a foundation worth searching for. anything.

When can I see you again?” “In 2 hours or tomorrow.” I walked to the door. You walk like a poem,” she said. “See you in 2 hours,” I told her.

sleeping in the rain helps me forget things like I am going to die and you are going to die and the cats are going to die but it's still good to stretch out and know you have arms and feet and a head, hands, all the parts, even eyes to close once more, it really helps to know these things, to know your advantages and your limitations, but why do the cats have to die, I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

gratuitous masturbation of the psyche.

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

Living too long takes more than time

who put this brain inside of me? it cries it demands it says that there is a chance. it will not say "no.

no concept of danger, reality, flow or compassion. you can feel the despair escaping from their machines, their lives as hopeless and as numbed as yours.

The Blue Bird from The Last Night of the Earth Poems there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you. there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he’s in there. there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe? there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody’s asleep. I say, I know that you’re there, so don’t be sad. then I put him back, but he’s still singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?

it’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse. death he’s ready for, or murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood … no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse …

people are worn away with striving, they hide in common habits. their concerns are herd concerns. few have the ability to stare at an old shoe for ten minutes or to think of odd things like who invented the doorknob? they become unalive because they are unable to pause undo themselves unkink unsee unlearn roll clear. listen to their untrue laughter, then walk away.

fuck everybody.

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it.

We must bring our own light to the darkness. Nobody is going to do it for us.

I know a woman who keeps buying puzzles chinese puzzles blocks wires pieces that finally fit into some order. she works it out mathmatically she solves all her puzzles lives down by the sea puts sugar out for the ants and believes ultimately in a better world. her hair is white she seldom combs it her teeth are snaggled and she wears loose shapeless coveralls over a body most women would wish they had. for many years she irritated me with what I considered her eccentricities- like soaking eggshells in water (to feed the plants so that they'd get calcium). but finally when I think of her life and compare it to other lives more dazzling, original and beautiful I realize that she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know (and by hurt I simply mean hurt). she has had some terrible times, times when maybe I should have helped her more for she is the mother of my only child and we were once great lovers, but she has come through like I said she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world. she has won. Frances, this poem is for you.

you are good but you are too emotional the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,study it and put it to sleep in the abstract. is there anything less abstract than dying everyday and on the last day?

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. it kept me from being an industrialist. it allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. it gave me space, a pause. it helped me to write this.

my poems are only bits of scratching on the floor of a cage.

age is no crime but the shame of a deliberately wasted life among so many deliberately wasted lives is.

There is a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out.

mainly thinking, well, I'm still alive and have the ability to expel wastes from my body and poems. and as long as that's happening I have the ability to handle betrayal loneliness hangnail clap and the economic reports in the financial section.

I get the blues for him, for me, for all of us: for want of something to do we keep slaying our small dragons as the big one waits.

You women have more holes than swiss cheese.

I walked about naked and barefoot stepping onto shards of glass sometimes feeling it sometimes not.

you have to accept this reality as the madhouse walls bulge break and the terrified insane flood our ugly streets. you have to accept terrible reality.

Truth changes as men change, and when truth becomes stable men will become dead, and the insect and the fire and the flood will become truth.

Although looked down upon, the idiots seemed to have the more peaceful lives: nothing was expected of them.

beware women grown old who were never anything but young

I always had this certain contentment- I wouldn't call it happiness- it was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occurring

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else.

little sun little moon little dog and a little to eat and a little to love and a little to live for in a little room filled with little mice who gnaw and dance and run while I sleep waiting for a little death in the middle of a little morning in a little city in a little state my little mother dead my little father dead in a little cemetery somewhere. I have only a little time to tell you this: watch out for little death when he comes running but like all the billions of little deaths it will finally mean nothing and everything: all your little tears burning like the dove, wasted.

they thought that writing had something to do with the politics of the thing. they were simply not crazy enough in the head to sit down to a typer and let the words bang out. they didn't want to write they wanted to succeed at writing.

I look like a man in a death camp. I am. still, I'm lucky: I feat on solitude, I will never miss the crowd.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.

it’s half-past nowhere everywhere.

it is a fine sunny day and great matters loom across the horizon of history. Carthage in my rearview mirror, I blend into Time.

it’s as if he were hiding in there and I want to console him, say: “I am sorry, poor fellow, but creation has its limits.

then I was a young man a thousand years old, and now I am an old man waiting to be born.

she wants me to write a love poem but I think if people can’t love each other’s assholes and farts and shits and terrible parts just like they love the good parts, that ain’t complete love.

Early evening traffic was beginning to clog the avenue with cars. The sun slanted down behind him. Harry glanced at the drivers of the cars. They seemed unhappy. The world was unhappy. People were in the dark. People were terrified and disappointed. People were caught in traps. People were defensive and frantic. They felt as if their lives were being wasted. And they were right.

I’ll think nice things about my wife, she looks so small there under the blanket, a little lump, that’s all (death, you take me first, please) this lady needs a gentle space of peace without me).

the bar was the best place to hide in. time came under your control, time to wade in, time to do nothing in. no guru was needed, no god. nothing expected but yourself and nothing lost to the unexpected.

dear J: I feel lucky that I didn’t fuck you the first time we met in Houston, but luckier that I didn’t fuck you the last time we met in San Francisco. this is the answer to your letter even though I don’t know if you’ll ever read it. the words are yours but I’ll get credit for the poem. you see, it could never have worked, the way I am. B.

as a very young man I divided an equal amount of time between the bars and the libraries; how I managed to provide for my other ordinary needs is the puzzle; well, I simply didn’t bother too much with that— if I had a book or a drink then I didn’t think too much of other things—fools create their own paradise.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate

Sometimes you make a mistake, taking the wrong poem more often I make the mistake, writing it.

is there any wonder why the world is where it’s at now? just notice the creature sitting near you in a movie house or standing ahead of you in a supermarket line. or giving a State of the Union Address. that the gods have let us go on this long this badly.

another hot summer night as I sit here and play at being a writer again. and the worst thing of course is that the words will never truly break through for any of us. some nights I have taken the sheet out of the typer and held it over the cigarette lighter, flicked it and waited for the result.

Yawn... I believe that I love sleep much more than anybody I’ve ever met. I have the ability to sleep for 2 or 3 days and nights. I will go to bed at any given moment. I often confused my girlfriends this way— say it would be about onethirty in the afternoon: “well, I’m going to bed now, I’m going to sleep…” most of them wouldn’t mind, they would go to bed with me thinking I was hinting for sex but I would just turn my back and snore off. this, of course, could explain why so many of my girlfriends left me. as for doctors, they were never any help: “listen, I have this desire to go to bed and sleep, almost all the time. what is wrong with me?” “do you get enough exercise?” “yes…” “are you getting enough nourishment?” “yes…” they always handed me a prescription which I threw away between the office and the parking lot. it’s a curious malady because I can’t sleep between 6 p.m. and midnight. it must occur after midnight and when I arise it can never be before noon. and should the phone ring say at 10:30 a.m. I go into a mad rage don’t even ask who the caller is scream into the phone: “WHAT ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR AT THIS HOUR!” hang up… every person, I suppose, has their eccentricities but in an effort to be normal in the world’s eye they overcome them and therefore destroy their special calling. I’ve kept mine and do believe that they have lent generously to my existence. I think it’s the main reason I decided to become a writer: I can type anytime and sleep when I damn well please.

often it takes a lifetime to learn how to react to certain critical situations. it's worth waiting for the arrival of maturity and confidence. try it sometime and see how delightful it is to feel powerful and alive.

Still afraid of pain behind my four-day beard.

people who believe in politics are like people who believe in god: they are sucking wind through bent straws. there

They had been afraid of the man with the beautifil eyes. And we were afraid then that all troughout our lives things like that would happen, that nobody wanted anybody to be strong and beautiful like that, that others will never allow it, and that many people will have to die.

unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

burning in hell this piece of me fits in nowhere as other people find things to do with their time places to go with one another things to say to each other. Iam burning in hell some place north of Mexico. flowers don’t grow here. I am not like other people other people are like other people. they are all alike: joining grouping huddling they are both gleeful and content andIam burning in hell. my heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people. I’d die on their picnic grounds smothered by their flags slugged by their songs unloved by their soldiers gored by their humor murdered by their concern. I am not like other people. Iam burning in hell. the hell of myself.

I went into the men's room and stared in the mirror at my face in disgust. I looked like I knew something, but it was a lie, I was a fake and there's nothing worse in the world than when a man suddenly realizes and admits to himself that he's a phoney, after spending all his time up to then trying to convince himself that he wasn't. I stared at all the sinks and pipes and bowls and I felt like them, worse than them: I'd rather be them.

What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.” “What is your advice to older writers?” “If you’re still alive, you don’t need any advice.” “What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?” “What makes you take a shit?” “What do you think of Reagan and unemployment?” “I don’t think of Reagan or unemployment.

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. we got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. so you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe it was the upper case. you were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers, editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. it was best like this.

you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something has always been in the way but now I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this place, a large studio, you should see the space and the light. for the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and the time to create.” no baby, if you’re going to create you’re going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children while you’re on welfare, you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you’re going to create blind crippled demented, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire. baby, air and light and time and space have nothing to do with it and don’t create anything except maybe a longer life to find new excuses for.

shot in the eye shot in the brain shot in the ass shot like a flower in the dance amazing how death wins hands down amazing how much credence is given to idiot forms of life amazing how laughter has been drowned out amazing how viciousness is such a constant I must soon declare my own war on their war I must hold to my last piece of ground I must protect the small space I have made that has allowed me life my life not their death my death not their death this place, this time, now I vow to the sun that I will laugh the good laugh once again in the perfect place of me forever. their death not my life.

THE ALIENS from The Last Night Of The Earth Poems you may not believe it but there are people who go through life with very little friction of distress. they dress well, sleep well. they are contented with their family life. they are undisturbed and often feel very good. and when they die it is an easy death, usually in their sleep. you may not believe it but such people do exist. but i am not one of them. oh no, I am not one of them, I am not even near to being one of them. but they are there and I am here.

downers some people grind away making their unhappiness the ultimate factor of their existence until finally they are just automatically unhappy, their suspicious upset snarling selves grinding on and at and for and through their only relief being to meet another unhappy person or to create one.

A. Huxley died at 69, much too early for such a fierce talent, and I read all his works but actually Point Counter Point did help a bit in carrying me through the factories and the drunk tanks and the unsavory ladies. that book along with Hamsun’s Hunger they helped a bit. great books are the ones we need.

she died of alcoholism wrapped in a blanket on a deck chair on an ocean steamer. all her books of terrified loneliness all her books about the cruelty of loveless love were all that was left of her as the strolling vacationer discovered her body notified the captain and she was quickly dispatched to somewhere else on the ship as everything continued just as she had written it.

his is the last poem of any number of poems tonight, there’s one drink of wine left and both of those guys they are asleep across the top of my feet. I can feel the gentle weight of them the touch of fur I am aware of their breathing: good things happen often, remember that as the Bombs trundle out in their magnificent dumbness these at my feet know more, are more, and instants of the moments explode larger and a lucky past can never be killed.

You think of killing him on the spot but discard that thought and leave, down into the urine-stinking elevator, they have you crucified too, America at work, where they rip out your intestines and your brain and your will and your spirit. They suck you dry, then throw you away. The capitalist system. The work ethic. The profit motive. The memory of your father’s words, “work hard and you’ll be appreciated.” of course, only if you make much more for them than they pay you.

Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had proceeded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn't and the food wasn't and the rent wasn't. Sometimes the typer was in hock. Sometimes there was only the park bench. But at the best of times there was the small room and the machine and the bottle. The sound of the keys, on and on, and shouts: 'HEY! KNOCK THAT OFF, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! WE'RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE'VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!' With broom sticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines...

What kind of shit was I? I could certainly play some nasty, unreal games. What was my motive? Was I trying to get even for something? Could I keep on telling myself that it was merely a matter of research, a simple study of the female? I was simply letting things happen without thinking about them. I wasn't considering anything but my own selfish, cheap pleasure. I was like a spoiled high school kid. I was worse than any whore; a whore took your money and nothing more. I tinkered with lives and souls as if they were playthings. How could I call myself a man? How could I write poems? What did I consist of? I was a bush-league de Sade, without his intellect. A murderer was more straightforward and honest than I was. Or a rapist. I didn't want my soul played with, mocked, pissed on; I knew that much at any rate. I was truly no good. I could feel it as I walked up and down on the rug. No good. The worst part of it was that I passed myself off for exactly what I wasn't - a good man. I was able to enter people's lives because of their trust in me. I was doing my dirty work the easy way. I was writing The Love Tale of the Hyena.

The Genius Of The Crowd there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace those who preach god, need god those who preach peace do not have peace those who preach peace do not have love beware the preachers beware the knowers beware those who are always reading books beware those who either detest poverty or are proud of it beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world not being able to love fully they will believe your love incomplete and then they will hate you and their hatred will be perfect like a shining diamond like a knife like a mountain like a tiger like hemlock their finest art

love poem to a stripper 50 years ago I watched the girls shake it and strip at The Burbank and The Follies and it was very sad and very dramatic as the light turned from green to purple to pink and the music was loud and vibrant, now I sit here tonight smoking and listening to classical music but I still remember some of their names: Darlene, Candy, Jeanette and Rosalie. Rosalie was the best, she knew how, and we twisted in our seats and made sounds as Rosalie brought magic to the lonely so long ago. now Rosalie either so very old or so quiet under the earth, this is the pimple-faced kid who lied about his age just to watch you. you were good, Rosalie in 1935, good enough to remember now when the light is yellow and the nights are slow.

And when you write a poem within the accepted poem-form, making it sound like a poem because a poem is a poem is a poem, you are saying “good morning” in that poem, and well, your morals are straight and you have not said SHIT, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could…instead of sweating out the correct image, the precise phrase, the turn of a thought…simply sit down and write the god damned thing, throwing on the color and sound, shaking us alive with the force, the blackbirds, the wheat fields, the ear in the hand of the whore, sun, sun, sun, SUN!; let’s make poetry the way we make love; let’s make poetry and leave the laws and the rules and the morals to the churches and the politicians; let’s make poetry the way we tilt the head back for the good liquor; let a drunken bum make his flame, and some day, Robert, I’ll think of you, pretty and difficult, measuring vowels and adverbs, making rules instead of poetry.

Yes, I know what you mean about writing and writers. We seem to have lost the target. Writers seem to write to be known as writers. They don’t write because something is driving them toward the edge. I look back at when Pound, T. S. Eliot, e. e. Cummings, Jeffers, Auden, Spender were about. Their work cracked right through the paper, set it on fire. Poems became events, explosions. There was a high excitement. Now, for decades there has seemed to be this lull, almost a practiced lull, as if dullness indicated genius. And if a new talent came along it was only a flash, a few poems, a thin book and then he or she was sanded down, ingested into the quiet nothingness. Talent without durability is a god damned crime. It means they went to the soft trap, it means they believed the praise, it means they settled short. A writer is not a writer because he has written some books. A writer is not a writer because he teaches literature. A writer is only a writer if he can write now, tonight, this minute. We have too many x-writers who type. Books fall from my hand to the floor. They are total crap. I think we have just blown away half a century to the stinking winds. Yes,

not much chance, completely cut loose from purpose, he was a young man riding a bus through North Carolina on the way to somewhere and it began to snow and the bus stopped at a little cafe in the hills and the passengers entered. he sat at the counter with the others, he ordered and the food arrived. the meal was particularly good and the coffee. the waitress was unlike the women he had known. she was unaffected, there was a natural humor which came from her. the fry cook said crazy things. the dishwasher. in back, laughed, a good clean pleasant laugh. the young man watched the snow through the windows. he wanted to stay in that cafe forever. the curious feeling swam through him that everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful there. then the bus driver told the passengers that it was time to board. the young man thought, I'll just sit here, I'll just stay here. but then he rose and followed the others into the bus. he found his seat and looked at the cafe through the bus window. then the bus moved off, down a curve, downward, out of the hills. the young man looked straight forward. he heard the other passengers speaking of other things, or they were reading or attempting to sleep. they had not noticed the magic. the young man put his head to one side, closed his eyes, pretended to sleep. there was nothing else to do - just to listen to the sound of the engine, the sound of the tires in the snow." - Charles Bukowski, "Nirvana