The People Look Like Flowers At Last Read online

  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

  lik
e 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 mass of black beard,

&nbs
p; 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

  egg.