The People Look Like Flowers At Last
New Poems
Charles Bukowski
Edited by John Martin
Contents
One
For They had Things to Say
Evening Class, 20 Years Later
The Snow of Italy
Near a Plate Glass Window
Beef Tongue
The 1930s
People as Flowers
Acceptance
Life At the P.O
The Minute
Too Near the Slaughterhouse
A Future Congressman
Stranger in a Strange City
Just Another Wino
It is Not Much
The Bull
The People, No
You Might as well Kiss Your Ass Goodbye
Purple Glow
One Thousand Dollars
Grip the Dark
The Dwarf with a Punch
The Elephants of Vietnam
Breakfast
Inverted Love Song
Salty Dogs
Brainless Eyes
Unbelievable
War and Peace
The Harder You Try
Two
All the Little Girls
No More of Those Young Men
Legs
Jane’s Shoes
Rimbaud be Damned
Bewitched in New York
Don’t Worry, Baby, I’ll Get It
The Telephone Message Machine
That Nice Girl Who Came in to Change the Sheets
An Agreement on Tchaikovsky
Love Song to the Woman I Saw Wednesday At the Racetrack
Possession
Six
Man Mowing the Lawn Across the Way from Me
The Girl Outside
The Chicken
An Ancient Love
Match Point
I Also Like to Look At Ceilings
No Cagney, Me
Soup, Cosmos and Tears
Peacock or Bell
Purple and Black
Fulfillment
Yours
Kissing Me Away
Goodbye, My Love
Heat
The Police Helicopter
Ah
Of Course
The Dream, The Dream
Note on the Tigress
Three
Poem for My Daughter
Sheets
Sick Leave
My Father
The old Woman
What Made You Lose Your Inspiration?
Another Poem About a Drunk and Then I’ll Let You Go
Dead Dog
I Live in a Neighborhood of Murder
The Bombing of Berlin
All Right, Camus
Quits
Adolf
The Anarchists
Perfect White Teeth
4 Blocks
You Can’t Force Your Way Through the Eye of the Needle
Two Kinds of Hell
My Faithful Indian Servant
A Plausible Finish
Another One of My Critics
Fog
Free?
Imported Punch
It Was an Underwood
The Creation Coffin
The 7 Horse
The Suicide
Overcast
The Final Word
Fingernails; Nostrils; Shoelaces
After Receiving a Contributor’s Copy
Poor Night
You Write Many Poems About Death
Four
Dog
The Hatred for Hemingway
Looking At the Cat’s Balls
Contributors’ Notes
On Beer Cans And Sugar Cartons
Pay Your Rent or Get Out
Note on a Door Knocker
The American Flag Shirt
Age
The Dogs Bark Knives
The Hog in the Hedge
I Never Bring My Wife
An Interview At 70
2 Views
Van Gogh and 9 Innings
9 A.M
Lousy Day
Sadness in the Air
The Great Debate
Our Deep Sleep
The Sorry History of Myself
Law
A Great Writer
A Gigantic Thirst
Eulogies
A Residue
1990 Special
Passage
A Most Dark Night in April
Sun Coming Down
About the Author
Other Books by Charles Bukowski
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
one
the heart roars like a lion
at what they’ve done to us.
for they had things to say
the canaries were there, and the lemon tree
and the old woman with warts;
and I was there, a child
and I touched the piano keys
as they talked—
but not too loudly
for they had things to say,
the three of them;
and I watched them cover the canaries at night
with flour sacks:
“so they can sleep, my dear.”
I played the piano quietly
one note at a time,
the canaries under their sacks,
and there were pepper trees,
pepper trees brushing the roof like rain
and hanging outside the windows
like green rain,
and they talked, the three of them
sitting in a warm night’s semicircle,
and the keys were black and white
and responded to my fingers
like the locked-in magic
of a waiting, grown-up world;
and now they’re gone, the three of them
and I am old:
pirate feet have trod
the clean-thatched floors
of my soul,
and the canaries sing no more.
evening class, 20 years later
the hungry tug of too late;
webs of needles,
the same trees are here;
and grass grown on grass
but the faces now are young
and as you walk across the campus thinking
“memory is a poor excuse for the present”
the legs want to let the body fall as
old images cling to you like mollusks
and the girls now gone who once
claimed your substance
hang like broken shades
across the windows of your mind;
—at one time here
everything was mine—
now young lions claim the territory
and look out casually
over loose paws
and decide
mercifully
to let this poor game crawl by. he, of course,
no match for the young lionesses,
or the Spring in the early sky.
at one time here—
once—
I enter a room and stand against a wall
and hear my name read, and
no, it is not the same:
my old professor looked like a walrus
as he spit my name out
into the spittoon of the world
and I said, HERE! while
feeling the sun run down
thru the hair
of my head
like wires feeding life into life:
white rain, sea wild;
but this new one whispers my name (and it is dark);
and like a claw reaching down into some pit of me,
surrounded by walls like tombs I answer meekly,
here,
and he moves on to another name.
I am older than he
and certainly not as fortunate
as the lionesses curl at his feet and purr delightedly,
and one gray old cat
twists its neck
and asks me: have you been here before?
yes, yes, yes, yes
I have
been here
before.
the snow of Italy
over my radio now
comes the sound of a truly mad organ,
I can see some monk
drunk in a cellar
mind gone or found,
talking to God in a different way;
I see candles and this man has a red beard
as God has a red beard;
it is snowing, it is Italy, it is cold
and the bread is hard
and there is no butter,
only wine
wine in purple bottles
with giraffe necks,
and now the organ rises, again,
he violates it,
he plays it like a madman,
there is blood and spit in his beard,
he wants to laugh but there isn’t time,
the sun is going out,
then his fingers slow,
now there is exhaustion and the dream,
yes, even holiness,
man going to man,
to the mountain, the elephant, the star,
and a candle falls
but continues to burn upon its side,
a wax puddle shining in the eyes
of my red monk,
there is moss on the walls
and the stain of thought and failure and
waiting,
then again the music comes like hungry tigers,
and he laughs,
it is a child’s laugh, an idiot’s laugh,
laughing at nothing,
the only laugh that understands,
he holds the keys down
like stopping everything
and the room blooms with madness,
and then he stops, stops,
and sits, the candles burning,
one up, one down,
the snow of Italy is all that’s left,
it is over: the essence and the pattern.
I watch as
he pinches out the candles with his fingers,
wincing near the outer edge of each eye
and the room is dark
as everything has always been.
near a plate glass window
dogs and angels are not
very far apart.
I often go to this little place
to eat
about 2:30 in the afternoon
because all the people who eat
there are completely sane,
glad to be simply alive and
eating their food
near a plate glass window
which welcomes the sun
but doesn’t let the cars and
the sidewalks come inside.
across the street is a Chinese
nudie bar
already open at 2:30 in the
afternoon.
it is painted an
inane and helpless
blue.
we are allowed as many free
coffees as we can drink
and we all sit and quietly drink
the strong black coffee.
it is good to be sitting some place
in public at 2:30 in the afternoon
without getting the flesh ripped from
your bones.
nobody bothers us.
we bother nobody.
angels and dogs are not
very far apart
at 2:30 in the afternoon.
I have my favorite table
by the window
and after I have finished
I stack the plates, saucers,
the cup, the silverware, etc.
neatly
in one easy pile—
my offering to the
elderly waitress—
food and time
untorn,
and that bastard sun
out there
working good
all up and
down.
beef tongue
I hadn’t eaten for a couple of days
and I had mentioned that several times
and I was up at this poet’s place
where a tiny woman took care of him.
he was a big bearded ox with a brain twice as large as the
world, and we’d been up all night
listening to tapes, talking, smoking, swallowing pills.
his woman had gone to bed hours ago.
it was 10 a.m.
and the sunlight came on in not caring that we hadn’t slept
and the next thing I knew
he was coming out of the kitchen
saying, “hey, Chinaski! LOOK!”
I couldn’t see clearly—
at first it looked like a yellow boot filled with water
then it looked like a fish without a head
and then it looked like an elephant’s cock,
and then he brought it closer:
“beef tongue! beef tongue!”
he held it out at arm’s length
right in my face:
“BEEF TONGUE! BEEF TONGUE!”
and it was, and I never imagined a steer’s tongue was that
fat and long,
it was a rape,
they had gone deep into the creature’s throat
and hacked it out, and here it was now:
“BEEF TONGUE!”
and it was yellow and pink
and
it was gagging all by itself
just another reasonable and sensible atrocity
committed by intelligent men.
I was not an intelligent man. I
made it to the sink and began to
heave.
stupid, of course, stupid, it was only dead meat,
no feeling now, the pain long since run out of the bottom of the
world
but I continued to vomit, finished, cleaned up the sink
and walked back
in. “sorry,” I said.
“it’s o.k., I forgot about your stomach.”
then he walked the tongue back into the kitchen
and then came out and we talked of this and that
and in about ten minutes
I heard the water boiling and I smelled the tongue cooking
in that bubbling water without mouth or eye
or name, it was a huge tongue going around and around
under that lid
and stinking
becoming cooked tongue
becoming most delicious and flavored
but since he was an agreeable fellow
I asked him please to turn it off.
it was a cold morning and as I shivered in the doorway
as I got ready to leave
the new air was good
I could feel the legs the heart the lungs
beginning to envision another chance.
we talked about a book of poems he was helping me
edit, then I said “goodbye, keep in
touch,” and we didn’t shake hands, a thing neither of us
liked to do
and I went up the path and out to my car and started the
engine and as I warmed it up I imagined him moving back into the
kitchen behind that m
ass of black beard,
those blue diamond eyes shining out of
all that black hair
those intelligent happy blue diamond eyes
knowing everything (almost), and then
turning the flame on again
the water beginning to shift and simmer
the tongue moving around in there
once again.
and I, stupid in my machine, turned away from the
curb, let it roll through the yellow morning,
down around the curves and dips,
all that green growing nicely along the side
of the road.
well,
thank Christ he hadn’t invited me to stay to
dinner. when I got home I thumbed through some
Renoir, Pissarro and Diaz
prints. then I ate a hard-boiled