Some dogs who sleep At night
must dream of bones
and I remember your bones
in flesh and best
in that dark green dress
and those high-heeled bright
black shoes,-
you always cursed when you drank,
your hair coming down you
wanted to explode out of
What was holding you:
rotten memories of a
rotten past, and
you finally got out
by dying, leaving me with the
rotten present; you’ve been dead
28 years
yet I remember you
better than any of the rest;
you were the only

We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting
-Finish by Charles Bukowski

the critics now have me
drinking champagne and
driving a BMW
and also married to a
socialite from
Philadelphia’s Main Line
which of course is going to prevent me
from writing my earthy
and grubby stuff.
and they might be
right,
I could be getting to be
more like them,
and that’s as close to
death as you can
get.
we’ll see.
but don’t bury me yet.
don’t worry if I drink with
Sean Penn.
just measure the poems
as they come off the
keyboard.
listen only to them.
after this long fight
I

you haven’t lived
until you’ve been in a
flophouse
with nothing but one
light bulb
and 56 men
squeezed together
on cots
with everybody snoring
at once
and some of those
snores so
deep and
gross and
unbelievable dark
snotty gross
subhuman
wheezings
from hell itself.
your mind
almost breaks
under those
death-like sounds
and the
intermingling
odors: hard
unwashed socks
pissed and
shitted underwear
and over it all
slowly circulating air
much like that
emanating from
uncovered
garbage cans.
and those bodies
in the dark
fat and
thin and
bent some
legless armless
some mindless
and worst of all:
the total
absence of hope
it shrouds them
covers them totally.
it’s not bearable.
you get up
go

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick-
up her lovely dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird

He drank wine all night of the
28th, and he kept thinking of her:-
the way she walked and talked and loved
the way she told him things that seemed true
but were not, and he knew the color of each
of her dresses
and her shoes-he knew the stock and curve of
each heel
as well as the leg shaped by it.
and she was out again and when he came home,and
she’d come back with that special

I can remember starving in a
small room in a strange city
shades pulled down, listening to
classical music
I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible-
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect.
the old composers – Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and
they were dead.
finally, starved and beaten, I

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside
remembering all the times you’ve felt that way, and
you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway,
get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the
newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee

Sunday, I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthadox 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 rythmic dance
reading the Bible. . .
long gold earrings;
two gold bracelets on each arm,
and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that

I read a book about John Dos Passos and according to
the book once radical-communist
John ended up in the Hollywood Hills living off investments
and reading the
–
Wall Street Journal
–
this seems to happen all too often.
what hardly ever happens is
a man going from being a young conservative to becoming an
old wild-ass radical
however:
–
young conservatives always seem to become old
conservatives.
it’s a kind of lifelong mental vapor-lock.
but when a young radical ends up an
old radical
the

this fear of being what they are:
dead.
at least they are not out on the street, they
are careful to stay indoors, those
pasty mad who sit alone before their tv sets,
their lives full of canned, mutilated laughter.
their ideal neighborhood
of parked cars
of little green lawns
of little homes
the little doors that open and close
as their relatives visit
throughout the holidays
the doors closing
behind the dying who die so slowly
behind the dead who are still alive
in

drunk again at 3 a.m. at the end of my 2nd bottle
of wine, I have typed from a dozen to 15 pages of
poesy
an old man
maddened for the flesh of young girls in this
dwindling twilight
liver gone
kidneys going
pancrea pooped
top-floor blood pressure
-Here I Am by Charles Bukowski

There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austin, Jane Austin, too.
“I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are at work.”
-His Wife The Painter by

hooray say the roses, today is blamesday
and we are red as blood.
hooray say the roses, today is Wednesday
and we bloom wher soldiers fell
and lovers too,
and the snake at the word.
hooray say the roses, darkness comes
all at once, like lights gone out,
the sun leaves dark continents
and rows of stone.
hooray say the roses, cannons and spires,
birds, bees, bombers, today is Friday
the hand holding a medal out the window,
a moth going by,

she was hot, she was so hot
I didn’t want anybody else to have her,
and if I didn’t get home on time
she’d be gone, and I couldn’t bear that-
I’d go mad. . .
it was foolish I know, childish,
but I was caught in it, I was caught.
I delivered all the mail
and then Henderson put me on the night pickup run
in an old army truck,
the damn thing began to heat halfway through

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn’t call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong with the girls.
– How Is Your Heart? by Charles Bukowski

I reached up into the top of the closet
and took out a pair of blue panties
and showed them to her and
asked:
“are these yours?”
-I Made A Mistake by Charles Bukowski

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
“it’s not pretty.”
-Charles Bukowski

In the betting line the other
day man behind me asked,
“are you Henry
Chinaski?”
“uh huh,” I answered.
“I like your books,” he went on.
“thanks,” I answered.
“who do you like in this
race?” he asked.
“uh uh,” I answered.
“I like the 4 horse,” he
told me. I made my bet and went back
to my seat….
the next race I am standing in
line and here is this same man
standing behind me again.
there are at least 50 lines at
the

she’s young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
I thought it was all working,
and now it’s her again,
every time she phones you go crazy,
you told me it was over
you told me it was finished,
listen, I’ve lived long enough to become a
good woman,
why do you need a bad woman?
you need to be tortured, don’t you?
you think life is rotten

There is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing that
gentle pure space
it’s worth
centuries of
existence say
just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch
that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won’t
get it all
ever.

almost dawn
blackbirds on the telephone wire
waiting
as I eat yesterday’s
forgotten sandwich
at 6 a.m.
an a quiet Sunday morning.
one shoe in the corner
standing upright
the other laying on it’s
side.
yes, some lives were made to be
wasted.
-It was just a little while ago by Charles Bukowski

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men- poor folks-
work.
That moment- to this. . .
may be years in the way they measure,
but it’s only

either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you

when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb, unsophisticated.
I had bad blood, a twisted
mind, a precarious
upbringing.

I was hard as granite, I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.

I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted, jailed,in and
out of fights, in and out
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at, I had no