Mockingbird Wish Me Luck Read online

  CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  MOCKINGBIRD WISH ME LUCK

  for Linda King

  for all the good reasons

  Table of Contents

  I.

  a free 25 page booklet

  the smoking car

  the world’s greatest loser

  the garbageman

  girl in a miniskirt reading the bible

  moyamensing prison:

  notes upon the flaxen aspect:

  funhouse

  another academy

  a day at the oak tree meet

  rain

  the colored birds

  another lousy 10 percenter

  making it

  drunk ol’ bukowski drunk

  the poetry reading

  slim killers

  the last days of the suicide kid

  bang bang

  5 men in black passing my window

  the poet’s muse

  somebody

  story and poem

  and the moon and the stars and the world

  get the nose

  my landlady and my landlord

  bad night

  hogs in the sky

  the white poets

  the black poets

  millionaires

  poetry

  the painter

  the inquisitor

  my friend william

  300 poems

  lifting weights at 2 a.m.

  reality

  earthquake

  the good life at o’hare airport

  the golfers

  II.

  the mockingbird

  ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha

  a fine day and the world looks good

  vacancy

  3:16 and one half…

  the rat

  hot

  radio

  ariel

  the passing of a dark gray moment

  consummation of grief

  those sons of bitches

  the hunt

  the big fire

  ww 2

  ants

  he wrote in lonely blood

  six chink fishermen

  burning

  a sound in the brush

  the wild

  4th of july

  carnival

  99 degrees

  happy new year

  the shoelace

  chilled green

  life

  III.

  american matador

  I saw an old-fashioned whore today

  poem for barbara, poem for jane

  short order

  the dwarf

  merry christmas

  marina

  one with dante

  an interesting night

  a threat to my immortality

  climax

  a man’s woman

  tight pink dress

  more or less, for julie

  this is the way it goes and goes and goes

  left with the dog

  praying for a best seller

  that one

  have you ever kissed a panther?

  2 carnations

  man and woman in bed at ten p.m.

  the answer

  a split

  power failure

  snake in the watermelon

  style

  the shower

  if we take—

  About the Author

  Other Books by Charles Bukowski

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  the world is full of shipping clerks

  who have read

  the Harvard Classics

  a free 25 page booklet

  dying for a beer dying

  for and of life

  on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

  listening to symphony music from my little red radio

  on the floor.

  a friend said,

  “all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk

  and lay down

  somebody will pick you up

  somebody will take care of you.”

  I look out the window at the sidewalk

  I see something walking on the sidewalk

  she wouldn’t lay down there,

  only in special places for special people with special $$$$

  and

  special ways

  while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in

  Hollywood,

  nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the

  sidewalk

  moving it past your famished window

  she’s dressed in the finest cloth

  she doesn’t care what you say

  how you look what you do

  as long as you do not get in her

  way, and it must be that she doesn’t shit or

  have blood

  she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.

  I am too sick to lay down

  the sidewalks frighten me

  the whole damned city frightens me,

  what I will become

  what I have become

  frightens me.

  ah, the bravado is gone

  the big run through center is gone

  on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

  my radio cracks and spits its dirty music

  through a floor full of empty beerbottles.

  now I hear a siren

  it comes closer

  the music stops

  the man on the radio says,

  “we will send you a free 25 page booklet:

  FACE THE FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE COSTS.”

  the siren fades into the cardboard mountains

  and I look out the window again as the clasped fist of

  boiling cloud comes down—

  the wind shakes the plants outside

  I wait for evening I wait for night I wait sitting in a chair

  by the window—

  the cook drops in the live

  red-pink salty

  rough-tit crab and

  the game works

  on

  come get me.

  the smoking car

  they stop out front here

  it looks as if the car is on fire

  the smoke blazes blue from the hood and exhaust

  the motor sounds like cannon shots

  the car humps wildly

  one guy gets out,

  Jesus, he says, he takes a long drink from a

  canvas water bag

  and gives the car an eerie look.

  the other guy gets out and looks at the car,

  Jesus, he says,

  and he takes a drink from a pint of whiskey,

  then passes the bottle to his

  friend.

  they both stand and look at the car,

  one holding the whiskey, the other the water bag.

  they are not dressed in conventional hippie garb

  but in natural old clothes

  faded, dirty and torn.

  a butterfly goes past my window

  and they get back in the

  car

  and it bucks off in low

  like a rodeo bronc

  they are both laughing

  and one has the bottle

  tilted…

  the butterfly is gone

  and outside there is a globe of smoke

  40 feet in circumference.

  first human beings I’ve seen in Los Angeles

  in 15 years.

  the world’s greatest loser

  he used to sell papers in front:

  “Get your winners! Get rich on a dime!”

  and about the 3rd or 4th race
/>   you’d see him rolling in on his rotten board

  with roller skates underneath.

  he’d propel himself along on his hands;

  he just had small stumps for legs

  and the rims of the skate wheels were worn off.

  you could see inside the wheels and they would wobble

  something awful

  shooting and flashing

  imperialistic sparks!

  he moved faster than anybody, rolled cigarette dangling,

  you could hear him coming

  “god o mighty, what was that?” the new ones asked.

  he was the world’s greatest loser

  but he never gave up

  wheeling toward the 2 dollar window screaming:

  “IT’S THE 4 HORSE, YOU FOOLS! HOW THE HELL YA

  GONNA BEAT THE

  4?”

  up on the board the 4 would be reading

  60 to one.

  I never heard him pick a winner.

  they say he slept in the bushes. I guess that’s where he

  died. he’s not around any

  more.

  there was the big fat blonde whore

  who kept touching him for luck, and

  laughing.

  nobody had any luck. the whore is gone

  too.

  I guess nothing ever works for us. we’re fools, of course—

  bucking the inside plus a 15 percent take,

  but how are you going to tell a dreamer

  there’s a 15 percent take on the

  dream? he’ll just laugh and say,

  is that all?

  I miss those

  sparks.

  the garbageman

  we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts

  the garbageman said

  dropping to one knee

  and blowing the head away from the priest’s

  neck

  and as the green bus stopped at the corner

  a cripple got out and a witch and a little girl

  with a flower.

  we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts

  the garbageman said

  and he shot the cripple and the witch

  but did not fire at the little girl,

  then he ran down an alley

  and climbed up on the roof of a garage,

  reloaded

  as the Goodyear Blimp sailed overhead

  he pumped 6 shots, saying,

  here are some unsolicited manuscripts,

  and the blimp wavered, paused,

  then began to nose down as 2 men parachuted

  out

  saying Hail Marys.

  8 squad cars entered the area

  and began to surround the garage

  and the garbageman said,

  we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts

  and he got one cop,

  and then they really began firing.

  the garbageman stood up in the center of the sky,

  threw his loaded rifle at them

  and all the shells

  and he said,

  we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts,

  and the first bullet got him in the chest,

  spun him,

  another in the back, one in the neck, and

  he fell on top of the garage roof,

  the blood rolling out on the tarpaper,

  blood like syrup blood like honey blood like blood,

  he said,

  Holy Mary, we do not accept…

  girl in a miniskirt reading the bible outside my window

  Sunday. I am eating a

  grapefruit. church is over at the Russian

  Orthodox to the

  west.

  she is dark

  of Eastern descent,

  large brown eyes look up from the Bible

  then down. a small red and black

  Bible, and as she reads

  her legs keep moving, moving,

  she is doing a slow rhythmic dance

  reading the Bible…

  long gold earrings;

  2 gold bracelets on each arm,

  and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,

  the cloth hugs her body,

  the lightest of tans is that cloth,

  she twists this way and that,

  long young legs warm in the sun…

  there is no escaping her being

  there is no desire to…

  my radio is playing symphonic music

  that she cannot hear

  but her movements coincide exactly

  to the rhythms of the

  symphony…

  she is dark, she is dark

  she is reading about God.

  I am God.

  moyamensing prison:

  we shot craps in the exercise yard while the

  dummies played ball with a torn-up shirt

  wound into a ball

  once or twice a day we had to break it up

  under a tommy gun from the tower—

  some blank-faced screw pointing it at

  us, but,

  by god, through it we somehow played

  and through some skill and

  luck

  I soon had all the money in the yard.

  and in the morning and in the days that followed—

  the screws, the sparrows, the shivs, the dips, the

  strongarms, the looneys, the hustlers, the freaks,

  the discarded dream-presidents of America, the cook,

  in fact, all my critics, they all called me

  “Mr. Bukowski,” a kind of fleeting immortality

  I guess,

  but real as hogs’ heads or dead flowers,

  and the force of it

  got to me there:

  “Mr. Bukowski,” ace-crapshooter,

  money-man in a world of almost no

  money.

  immortality.

  I didn’t recite them Shelley, no,

  and everything came to me after lights out:

  slim-hipped boys I didn’t want

  steaks and ice cream and cigars which I did

  want, and

  shaving cream, new razorblades, the latest copy of the

  New Yorker.

  what greater immortality than Heaven in Hell,

  and I continued to enjoy it until they

  threw me out on the streets

  back to my typewriter,

  innocent, lazy, frightened and mortal

  again.

  notes upon the flaxen aspect:

  a John F. Kennedy flower knocks upon my door and is

  shot through the neck;

  the gladiolas gather by the dozens around the tip of

  India

  dripping into Ceylon;

  dozens of oysters read Germaine Greer.

  meanwhile, I itch from the slush of the Philippines

  to the eye of the minnow

  the minnow being eaten by the cumulative dreams of

  Simon Bolivar. O,

  freedom from the limitation of angular distance would be