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- the contents uncorrected
- bukowski often typed in ALL CAPS
- salutations & signoffs... asterisks... bracketed
- pamphlets of verse
- verification(s) of existence
- writing into voids
- & the rent's due
- 'i hate these saturdays'
- half-percepted // half-perceptions
- typographical error(s)
- and i think a double-spaced poem loses its backbone
- crouched down in the asphalt street
- cat-rose insane, stiff black like mad love depravity
- anthropologists
- & the mechanics of this type of thing
- half-and-half
- (almost a poem, the whole thing)
- riding back on the train drunk, all the women looking at somebody else
- bukowski old & grey & shrunk, et. al
- all pockets empty
- his mind is empty as a department store
- the first collected poems of a man of 40, who began writing late
- clean & pure, poem arrangement perfect
- drunken drafts // in the back-pocket
- yes, everything i do is "breathlessly new"
- high-class lonely hearts club (for those w/ typewriters)
- write about the human, what's left of him, where he's going, what he dropped on the floor
- writing words into paper, so you could see them
- the worn-flesh
- Art can't operate in crowds
- and maybe the only way sensitive people can override embarrassment is to howl
- when the letters become the poems
- or just don't fall thru the floorboards
- All unreal
- 'life is tuesday afternoon in a cage'
- but the act is really secondary
- the color of the dress i remember
- there is some evidence i was born // or at least conceived
- American, age 2
- all grotesques true
- i came out of there, white & old, in love with sunlight
- i was out of blood
- and what happened (the living of it) is still there
- but it was the only way, there was only one path
- and the sun's out good, but it's cold and i have a heater & the stove on, and somehow there's a feeling of peace today -- i feel like a fat man who ate a lot of turkey, and since this feeling does not arrive too often, i take it, i take of the good of it without examining it, without feeling selfish. that's what's good about being 42: you know when to go with what's left of the soul.
- it's a person's eccentricities that give him whatever he has
- i like the longer works, when the style is almost prose, but where everything is hard brick & breaking, where everything is up against the knife & very real
- and the pages are in your hands like warm things
- "i think it is important to be quiet & in love with park benches"
- it is 26 minutes before 9am and i am out of beer
- for all this, i still feel pretty much outside of everything yet
- somewhere the thought in coming down from the mind & out into the voice, the thought becomes dispelled, distorted, petty & so forth...
- the cleanliness...
- i have thrown my guts into the fire
- but these people are the oddest set of living gods you ever saw... she sells picture postcards on the sidewalks for meek coin & he stands 14 years hours a day poking paper into a cheap press he has hustled somewhere. i can't tell you more than this, only that these people are giants in a world of ants.
- an unhandsome sort of greed that is needed to fill a hole where something else should be
- thank the gods, thank the tulips
- and tho i say small things
- it is only shame & lack of heart & lack of ability & all the lacks that keep me from expressing what should be, and when the phone is put down i always feel as if i have failed -- not only in ordinary failure but in a failure that affects everything: myself & you & tomorrow morning & any way the smoke blows
- only one-tenth of myself
- wasted down to the nothingness of my arms & eyes & fingers & this letter tonight
- the poetry part of me
- for these few things. like a phone call from sacramento at 7:30pm.
- because there is still this hungry space within them
- rather go away angry & unloved than unangry & unloved
- a kind of eulogy
- to be essentially outside of life like lace
- but there's still room for a good symphony... there's room for things
- where i could listen to sounds not being written
- your own reflections getting pinched by the light
- a minor poet
- and i begin to wonder where the soul went
- there are good days, tho, where the whole world unfolds...
- these things are primaries & when you get them out of the way you can begin to worry or unworry about a hell of a lot of other things
- these are not admirable qualities
- but all of us have holes
- almost the whole structure of everything is wrong
- i am sorry forever
- i can't make it into heaven now
- a batch of poems
- learning
- but which nevertheless contain truths
- i sit way in back by myself
- that's the mathematics of it
- trying thru the Art form to become purified
- i had only the voice and the voice could not say, never damn can
- as i tangoed in & out of traffic
- now, this is not bad, but it adds up into living. no great words. nothing. but somehow good. how can you explain it?
- the past does not prove the present
- and everything in a kind of yellow-sandish grit, like a cheap dream, and you peel the money off...
- but the most noticeable part is you are getting used to it
- old newspapers & hacked-out minds & blue wind
- little old men with life-filled child eyes
- and there's a bed & the woman is putting a sheet on the bed & you can see part of the body through the sheet... oh, it is not vile ugly dirty but warm laugh clean and love -- and then on the sidelights: there is some kind of bird sitting on the head of the bed...
- still has velvet in his dreams
- and some of the floss fell away
- it's a gathering of dust & electrodes & a vomiting out, later
- the only thing which saves me from cutting my belly out like an apple pie is that i am a coward
- but i am not yet starving
- there is nothing sweeter to me than closing the door on the world, having the walls again
- Outsider of the Year, Outsider of the World
- but i hate to be petted by somebody else
- which does not make me a better Artist than Henry Miller, just a different person, and not nearly so famous, thank the gods
- peeling back the pages i ate the whole insides
- like a garden of good, like mountains, like everything that counts
- & everything gone except the soaring
- simply something nice about sitting in a room & drinking a beer & not saying much, feeling the world out there, and sitting there, sitting there, resting
- so instead i mailed them what i had made in my room among the beercans
- i got to figure out that what i can't read isn't any good... (but) that's how flies get fat
- and love or the act of it should contain more than a couple of steaks in a frying pan or else all is lost like weeds in a garden or snails stepped upon & crushed & left in some sort of slime which contains life, smashed life forever & foreboding
- but it is a moment, a sound
- sometimes i think u think i think i am sliding under the table
- but that's not it, it's the TIME melting like vanilla, boy, and i am going ha, and that's it
- all the words of silence that crawl the walls
- we cure the obvious & the subtle takes over, and if it's subtle enough some grow fat & happy and others grow mad
- and it seems like courage, it seems like knowledge
- this is a pretty good feeling. some people go around looking for good feelings.
- 12 hours of madness a night
- all so unreal
- amateur drinkers, amateur christians, amateur human beings
- just enough ($) to allow me to keep all the books because i like them lined up against the wall...
- the wind is blowing singing inside my head
- formulas do not interest me, it is the thing being there like the sun that warms me...
- & when i say 'a little sadness' i know it will be mostly yours
- to the pure poem trying to breathe
- small utterings of inanity
- a little drunk, a good wall to hide behind
- a hotel on the corner & the gas fumes of traffic used to come up & choke my sick lazy lungs
- (that is escapism, too)
- she has this kind of coffeehouse attitude... this is a kind of obvious & tiring nobility
- another cigarette. a parliament.
- the possibility of love(...) within the clasel halls of my heart
- to swell all over blissful
- i've been having no dreams...
- ...without remembering the dream, how lonely
- soft tangibles
- ...nevertheless there's something in the room i'm not in on... pearls come in clams
- i realize what thicks & thins i'll have to wear this through...
- many kinds of purgatories
- but i've also learned that there are other forms of ugliness
- ...these do not diminish me
- and i stretch wall to wall in the light i feel as if i were filled with meat and oranges and burning suns
- i can't look at anything, really look at anything, without wanting to tear myself apart
- writing is only a sheet of paper; i am something that walks around & looks out of a window. amen.
- my new system seems to work but no good because as soon as i make it i blow it, give it away on the streets, burn it burn it, my god sometimes i think i am truly crazy, but hell, here i sit, trying to shape up for tomorrow to go back in it if the job is still there, and i never know
- many men who wish to kill themselves only wish to do it because they are tired of being born in an age that will not let them live
- ...i fall in love with my own limbs, my head ugly as it may be... my writes by merely being around them... my head, my breathing, my sense of the sun & walls; but when these things become too greatly violated by outside forces i will make the choice, and then finally the choice will not be now when but how?
- a room for rent, with low light...
- it isn't any secret that i am a rather backward man...
- we've got to live with loss like we used to
- i said nothing, not even in my head, but the sunlight knew, and my shoelaces, and (unintelligble)
- he talks outta the side of his mouth
- but she taught me where my arms were
- crouched down in the asphalt street
- ...and Penny is sitting there really rosy & radiant, with little freckles, on face & arms, red heart hair
- and how delicately
- & i believe that man has enough sunlight & god & luck within him to change the actual
- i go for the bloodflow stuff of the inner color
- an old man at 4 o'clock in the afternoon writing tea-leaf thoughts in a vestibule that smells of bacon & frogs & tumbling silence
- and not do this & not do that
- remember to clean the halls of yr brain
- ...best to "talk" the poems instead
- you can only save what you have left
- i look to the sun to make me well
- seeing grass
- the starving gutwork & pure glad madness
- always carrying what's left of my soul in a little glass jar in my pocket like a fishing worm
- it machineguns the mind
- anyhow i am sitting around feeling my legs & my arms & ...
oct 22 2019 ∞
nov 10 2023 +
nov 10 2023 +