The Roominghouse Madrigals
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
THE ROOMINGHOUSE MADRIGALS
EARLY SELECTED POEMS 1946-1966
Table of Contents
Foreword
22,000 Dollars in 3 Months
On Seeing an Old Civil War Painting…
What to Do with Contributor’s Copies?
Brave Bull
It’s Not Who Lived Here
O, We Are the Outcasts
Poem for My 43rd Birthday
The Genius of the Crowd
4:30 A.M.
The Simplicity of Everything in Viet Nam
The Night They Took Whitey
The Japanese Wife
Sundays Kill More Men Than Bombs
The Loser
On a Night You Don’t Sleep
An Empire of Coins
All I Know
On Going Back to the Street…
Anthony
Layover
The Dogs of Egypt
Old Man, Dead in a Room
Love Is a Piece of Paper Torn to Bits
Big Bastard with a Sword
About My Very Tortured Friend, Peter
Not Quite So Soon
Counsel
I Wait in the White Rain
Breakout
I Cannot Stand Tears
Horse on Fire
Mother and Son
The Day I Kicked Away a Bankroll
The Dogs
Imbecile Night
A Kind of Lecture…
The Gift
Object Lesson
Goldfish
Sleep
Hello, Willie Shoemaker
The Literary Life
Countryside
Death Wants More Death
Eat
10 Lions and the End of the World
The Blackbirds Are Rough Today
A Word on the Quick and Modern Poem-Makers
Seahorse
I Have Lived in England
Farewell, Foolish Objects
A Report Upon the Consumption of Myself
Fleg
Interviewed by a Guggenheim Recipient
Very
The Look:
One Night Stand
Poem to a Most Affectionate Lady
Parts of an Opera, Parts of a Guitar…
Letter from the North
The Best Way to Get Famous Is to Run Away
The Kings Are Gone
Reprieve and Admixture
The Swans Walk My Brain…
The End
A Farewell Thing While Breathing
Sad-Eyed Mules of Men
Dear Friend
A Conversation on Morality…
Soirée
Notations from a Muddled Indolence
Nothing Subtle
I Don’t Need a Bedsheet with Slits for Eyes…
86’d
The Ants
Suicide
3:30 A.M. Conversation
Cows in Art Class
Practice
I Kneel
Freedom: The Unmolested Eagle of Myself
Singing is Fire
The Sun Wields Mercy
On the Failure of a Poet
The Beast
A Rat Rises
Pansies
The Man with the Hot Nose
Hangover and Sick Leave
Mercy, Wherever You Are…
It’s Nothing to Laugh About
35 Seconds
Regard Me
With Vengeance Like a Tiger Crawls
Itch, Come and Gone
This
2 Outside, As Bones Break in My Kitchen
Saying Goodbye to Love
You Smoke a Cigarette
Friendly Advice to a Lot of Young Men
Everything
…American Express, Athens, Greece
One Hundred and Ninety-Nine Pounds…
I Write This Upon the Last Drink’s Hammer
Poem for Liz
A Nice Place
Insomnia
Wrong Number
When the Berry Bush Dies…
Face While Shaving
9 Rings
Somebody Always Breaking My Dainty Solitude…
Thank God for Alleys
The Millionaire
Dow Jones: Down
As I Lay Dying
A Minor Impulse to Complain
Buffalo Bill
Experience
I Am Visited by an Editor and a Poet
The Mexican Girls
The New Place
Conversation in a Cheap Room
I Was Born to Hustle Roses Down the Avenues of the Dead
Winter Comes to a Lot of Places in August
Bring Down the Beams
Reunion
Fragile!
I Am with the Roots of Flowers
Monday Beach, Cold Day
The High-Rise of the New World
The Gypsies Near Del Mar
6 A.M.
A Trick to Dull Our Bleeding
Rose, Rose
Spain Sits Like a Hidden Flower in My Coffeepot
Thermometer
Eaten by Butterflies
Destroying Beauty
About the Author
Other Books by Charles Bukowski
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
A question put to me quite often is, “Why do your out-of-print books cost so much?” Well, they cost so much because that’s what booksellers can get for them from collectors.
“I want to read your early poems but…”
I don’t even have some of my early books. Most of them were stolen by people I drank with. When I’d go to the bathroom, they did their shit. It only reinforced my general opinion of humanity. And caused me to drink with fewer people.
At first, I made efforts to replace these books, and did, but when they were stolen all over again I stopped the replacement process and more and more drank alone.
Anyhow, what follows are what we consider to be the best of the early poems. Some are taken from the first few books; others were not in books but have been taken from obscure magazines of long ago.
The early poems are more lyrical than where I am at now. I like these poems but I disagree with some who claim, “Bukowski’s early work was much better.” Some have made these claims in critical reviews, others in parlors of gossip.
Now the reader can make his own judgment, first hand.
In my present poetry, I go at matters more directly, land on them and then get out. I don’t believe that my early methods and my late methods are either inferior or superior to one another. They are different, that’s all.
Yet, re-reading these, there remains a certain fondness for that time. Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had preceded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn’t and the food wasn’t and the rent wasn’t. Sometimes the typer was in hock. Sometimes there was only the park bench. But at the best of times there was the small room and the machine and the bottle. The sound of the keys, on and on, and shouts: “HEY! KNOCK IT OFF, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! WE’RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE’VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!” With broomsticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines….
I was not Hamsun eating his own flesh in order to continue writing but I had a fair amount of travail. The poems were sent out as wr
itten on first impulse, no line or word changes. I never revised or retyped. To eliminate an error, I would simply go over it thus: #########, and go on with the line. One magazine editor printed a group of my poems with all the ########s intact.
At any rate, here are many of the poems from that wondrous and crazy time, from those distant hours. The room steamed with smoke, dizzied with fumes, we gambled. I hope they work for you. And if they don’t, well, #### ## ###.
Charles Bukowski
San Pedro, 10-31-87
22,000 Dollars in 3 Months
night has come like something crawling
up the bannister, sticking out its tongue
of fire, and I remember the
missionaries up to their knees in muck
retreating across the beautiful blue river
and the machine gun slugs flicking spots of
fountain and Jones drunk on the shore
saying shit shit these Indians
where’d they get the fire power?
and I went in to see Maria
and she said, do you think they’ll attack,
do you think they’ll come across the river?
afraid to die? I asked her, and she said
who isn’t?
and I went to the medicine cabinet
and poured a tall glassful, and I said
we’ve made 22,000 dollars in 3 months building roads
for Jones and you have to die a little
to make it that fast…Do you think the communists
started this? she asked, do you think it’s the communists?
and I said, will you stop being a neurotic bitch.
these small countries rise because they are getting
their pockets filled from both sides…and she
looked at me with that beautiful schoolgirl idiocy
and she walked out, it was getting dark but I let her go,
you’ve got to know when to let a woman go if you want to
keep her,
and if you don’t want to keep her you let her go anyhow,
so it’s always a process of letting go, one way or the other,
so I sat there and put the drink down and made another
and I thought, whoever thought an engineering course at Old Miss
would bring you where the lamps swing slowly
in the green of some far night?
and Jones came in with his arm around her blue waist
and she had been drinking too, and I walked up and said,
man and wife? and that made her angry for if a woman can’t
get you by the nuts and squeeze, she’s done,
and I poured another tall one, and
I said, you 2 may not realize it
but we’re not going to get out of here alive.
we drank the rest of the night.
you could hear, if you were real still,
the water coming down between the god trees,
and the roads we had built
you could hear animals crossing them
and the Indians, savage fools with some savage cross to bear.
and finally there was the last look in the mirror
as the drunken lovers hugged
and I walked out and lifted a piece of straw
from the roof of the hut
then snapped the lighter, and I
watched the flames crawl, like hungry mice
up the thin brown stalks, it was slow but it was
real, and then not real, something like an opera,
and then I walked down toward the machine gun sounds,
the same river, and the moon looked across at me
and in the path I saw a small snake, just a small one,
looked like a rattler, but it couldn’t be a rattler,
and it was scared seeing me, and I grabbed it behind the neck
before it could coil and I held it then
its little body curled around my wrist
like a finger of love and all the trees looked with eyes
and I put my mouth to its mouth
and love was lightning and remembrance,
dead communists, dead fascists, dead democrats, dead gods and
back in what was left of the hut Jones
had his dead black arm around her dead blue waist.
On Seeing an Old Civil War Painting with My Love
I
the cannoneer is dead,
and all the troops;
the conceited drummer boy
dumber than the tombs
lies in a net of red;
and under leaves, bugs twitch antennae
deciding which way to move
under the cool umbrella of decay;
the wind rills down like thin water
and searches under clothing,
sifting and sorry;
…clothing anchored with heavy bones
in noonday sleep
like men gone down on ladders, resting;
yet an hour ago
tree-shadow and man-shadow
showed their outline against the sun—
yet now, not a man amongst them
can single out the reason
that moved them down toward nothing;
and I think mostly of some woman far off
arranging important jars on some second shelf
and humming a dry, sun-lit tune.
II
outside, the quick storm turns the night slowly
backwards
and sends it shifting to old shores,
and everywhere are bones…rib bones and light,
and grass, grass leaning left;
and we hump our backs against the wet like living things,
and this one with me now
holds my yearning like a packet
slips it into her purse with her powders and potions
pulls up a sheer stocking, chatters, touches her hair:
it’s raining, oh damn it all, it’s raining!
and on the battlefield the rocks are wet and cool,