The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 Read online

  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 written 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: