The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Read online

  THE DAYS RUN AWAY LIKE WILD HORSES OVER THE HILLS

  CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  for

  Jane

  Table of Contents

  I.

  what a man I was

  mine

  freedom

  as the sparrow

  his wife, the painter

  down thru the marching

  these things

  poem for personnel managers:

  ice for the eagles

  plea to a passing maid

  waste basket

  ::: the old movies

  peace

  I taste the ashes of your death

  for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough:—

  Uruguay or hell

  notice

  for Jane

  conversation on a telephone

  ants crawl my drunken arms

  a literary discussion

  watermelon

  for one I knew

  when Hugo Wolf went mad—

  riot

  meanwhile

  a poem is a city

  the cat

  hermit in the city

  II.

  all-yellow flowers

  what seems to be the trouble, gentlemen?

  spring swan

  remains

  the moment of truth

  on the fire suicides of the buddhists

  a division

  conversation with a lady sipping a straight shot

  the way it will happen inside a can of peaches

  scene in a tent outside the cotton fields of Bakersfield:

  night animal

  on the train to Del Mar

  I thought of ships, of armies, hanging on…

  war and piece

  18 cars full of men thinking of what could have been

  the screw-game

  a night of Mozart

  sleeping woman

  when you wait for the dawn to crawl through the screen like a burglar to take your life away—

  poem while looking at an encyclopedia:

  3 lovers

  did I ever tell you?

  song of my typewriter:

  and the moon and the stars and the world:

  the sharks

  fag, fag, fag

  Ivan the Terrible

  the bones of my uncle

  a last shot on two good horses

  III.

  no grounding in the classics

  drawing of a band concert on a matchbox

  bad night

  down by the wings

  fire

  one for the old man

  a drawer of fish

  L. Beethoven, half-back

  self-destruction

  these mad windows that taste life and cut me if I go through them

  birth

  on getting famous and being asked: can you recite? can you be there at nine?

  the great one:

  yellow

  ::: the days run away like wild horses over the hills

  worms

  to hell with Robert Schumann

  the seminar

  one for Ging, with klux top

  communists

  family, family

  poem for the death of an American serviceman in Vietnam:

  guilt obsession behind a cloud of rockets:

  even the sun was afraid

  on a grant

  finish

  the underground

  from the Dept. of English

  footnote upon the construction of the masses:

  kaakaa & other immolations

  a problem of temperament

  poetess

  the miracle

  Mongolian coasts shining in light

  about the author

  other books by charles bukowski

  cover

  copyright

  about the publisher

  I

  get your name in LIGHTS

  get it up there in

  8½ x 11 mimeo

  what a man I was

  I shot off his left ear

  then his right,

  and then tore off his belt buckle

  with hot lead,

  and then

  I shot off everything that counts

  and when he bent over

  to pick up his drawers

  and his marbles

  (poor critter)

  I fixed it so he wouldn’t have

  to straighten up

  no more.

  Ho Hum.

  I went in for a fast snort

  and one guy seemed

  to be looking at me sideways,

  and that’s how he died—

  sideways,

  lookin’ at me

  and clutchin’

  for his marbles.

  Sight o’ blood made me kinda

  hungry.

  Had a ham sandwich.

  Played a couple of sentimental songs…

  Shot out all the lights

  and strolled outside.

  Didn’t seem to be no one around

  so I shot my horse

  (poor critter).

  Then I saw the Sheerf

  a standin’ at the end a’ the road

  and he was shakin’

  like he had the Saint Vitus dance;

  it was a real sorrowful sight

  so I slowed him to a quiver

  with the first slug

  and mercifully stiffened him

  with the second.

  Then I laid on my back awhile

  and I shot out the stars one by one

  and then

  I shot out the moon

  and then I walked around

  and shot out every light

  in town,

  and pretty soon it began to get dark

  real dark

  the way I like it;

  just can’t stand to sleep

  with no light shinin’

  on my face.

  I laid down and dreamt

  I was a little boy again

  a playin’ with my toy six-shooter

  and winnin’ all the marble games,

  and when I woke up

  my guns was gone

  and I was all bound hand and foot

  just like somebody

  was scared a me

  and they was slippin’

  a noose around my ugly neck

  just as if they

  meant to hang me,

  and some guy was pinnin’

  a real pretty sign

  on my shirt:

  there’s a law for you

  and a law for me

  and a law that hangs

  from the foot of a tree.

  Well, pretty poetry always did

  make my eyes water

  and can you believe it

  all the women was cryin’

  and though they was moanin’

  other men’s names

  I just know they was cryin’

  for me (poor critters)

  and though I’d slept with all a them,

  I’d forgotten

  in all the big excitement

  to tell ’em my name

  and all the men looked angry

  but I guess it was because the kids

  was all being impolite

  and a throwin’ tin cans at me,

  but I told ’em not to worry

  because their aim was bad anyhow

  not a boy there looked like he’d turn

  into a man—

  90% homosexuals, the lot of them,

  and some guy shouted

  “let’s send him to hell!”

&
nbsp; and with a jerk I was dancin’

  my last dance,

  but I swung out wide

  and spit in the bartender’s eye

  and stared down

  into Nellie Adam’s breasts,

  and my mouth watered again.

  mine

  She lays like a lump

  I can feel the great empty mountain

  of her head.

  But she is alive. She yawns and

  scratches her nose and

  pulls up the cover.

  Soon I will kiss her goodnight

  and we will sleep.

  and far away is Scotland

  and under the ground the

  gophers run.

  I hear engines in the night

  and through the sky a white

  hand whirls:

  good night, dear, goodnight.

  freedom

  he drank wine all night the 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 when he came home, and

  she’d come back with the special stink again,

  and she did

  she came in at 3 a.m. in the morning

  filthy like a dung-eating swine

  and

  he took out the butcher knife

  and she screamed

  backing into the roominghouse wall

  still pretty somehow

  in spite of love’s reek

  and he finished the glass of wine.

  that yellow dress

  his favorite

  and she screamed again.

  and he took up the knife

  and unhooked his belt

  and tore away the cloth before her

  and cut off his balls.

  and carried them in his hands

  like apricots

  and flushed them down the

  toilet bowl

  and she kept screaming

  as the room became red

  GOD O GOD!

  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

  and he sat there holding 3 towels

  between his legs

  not caring now whether she left or

  stayed

  wore yellow or green or

  anything at all.

  and one hand holding and one hand

  lifting he poured

  another wine.

  as the sparrow

  To give life you must take life,

  and as our grief falls flat and hollow

  upon the billion-blooded sea

  I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed

  with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures

  lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.

  Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow

  did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be

  young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.

  I hated you when it would have taken less courage

  to love.

  his wife, the painter

  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 Austen, Jane Austen, too.

  “I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are

  at work.”

  He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he

  fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like

  a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.

  He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than

  his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he

  self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his

  hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.

  Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.)

  Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.

  “She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”

  “What is it? A love affair?”

  “Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”

  I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a

  lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,

  and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that

  clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…

  men drive cars and paint their houses,

  but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.

  Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.

  Paris, Louvre.

  “I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”

  “Are you still reading Freud?”

  “Page 299.”

  She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one

  arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the

  snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve

  time and the dog.

  About church: the trouble with a mask is it

  never changes.

  So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.

  So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs

  and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the

  wind like the end of a tunnel.

  He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some

  segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.

  When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches

  warmer and more blood-real than the dove.

  Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.

  Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.

  He burned away in sleep.

  down thru the marching

  they came down thru the marching,

  down thru St. Paul, St. Louis, Atlanta,

  Memphis, New Orleans, they came

  down thru the marching, thru

  balloons and popcorn, past drugstores

  and blondes and whirling cats,

  they came down thru the marching

  scaring the goats and the kids in

  the fields, banging against the minds

  of the sick in their hot beds, and

  down in the cellar I got out the

  colt. I ripped a hole in the screen

  for better vision and when the legs

  came walking by on top of my head,

  I got a colonel, a major and 3 lieutenants