Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame Read online

  CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  Burning in Water Drowning in Flame

  for Steve Richmond

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Introduction

  It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (Poems 1955-1963)

  the tragedy of the leaves

  to the whore who took my poems

  the state of world affairs

  for marilyn m.

  the life of borodin

  no charge

  a literary romance

  the twins

  the day it rained at the los angeles county museum

  2 p.m. beer

  hooray say the roses

  the sunday artist

  old poet

  the race

  vegas

  the house

  side of the sun

  the talkers

  a pleasant afternoon in bed

  the priest and the matador

  love & fame & death

  my father

  the bird

  the singular self

  a 340 dollar horse and a hundred dollar whore

  Crucifix in a Deathhand (Poems 1963-1965)

  view from the screen

  crucifix in a deathhand

  grass

  fuzz

  no lady godiva

  the workers

  beans with garlic

  mama

  machineguns towers & timeclocks

  something for the touts

  sway with me

  lack of almost everything

  no. 6

  don’t come around but if you do

  startled into life like fire

  stew

  lilies in my brain

  i am dead

  like a violet in the snow

  letter from too far

  man in the sun

  woman

  like all the years wasted

  they, all of them, know

  a nice day

  At Terror Street and Agony Way (Poems 1965-1968)

  beerbottle

  the body

  k.o.

  sunday before noon

  7th race when the angels swung low and burned

  on going out to get the mail

  i wanted to overthrow the government

  the girls

  a note on rejection slips

  true story

  x-pug

  class

  living

  the intellectual

  shot of red-eye

  i met a genius

  poverty

  to kiss the worms goodnight

  john dillinger and le chasseur maudit

  the flower lover

  traffic ticket

  a little sleep and peace of silence

  he even looked like a nice guy

  children in the sky

  the weather is hot on the back of my watch

  note to a lady who expected rupert brooke

  the difference between a bad poet and a good one

  the curtains are waving

  for the mercy mongers

  Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame (Poems 1972-1973)

  now

  the trash men

  zoo

  tv

  lost

  hot

  love

  burn and burn and burn

  the way

  out of the arms

  death of an idiot

  tonalities

  hey, dolly

  a poorly night

  looking for a job

  the 8 count

  dogfight

  letters

  yes yes

  eddie and eve

  the fisherman

  warm asses

  what’s the use of a title?

  the tigress

  the catch

  wax job

  some people

  father, who art in heaven

  nerves

  the rent’s high too

  laugh literary

  deathbed blues

  charles

  on the circuit

  my friend, andre

  i was glad

  trouble with spain

  wet night

  we, the artists

  i can’t stay in the same room with that woman

  charisma

  the sound of human lives

  save the pier

  burned

  hell hath no fury

  pull a string, a puppet moves

  tougher than corned beef hash

  voices

  straight on through

  dreamlessly

  palm leaves

  About the Author

  Other Books by Charles Bukowski

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  The poems in the first three sections of this book are from the years 1955-1968 and the poems in the last section are the new work of 1972-1973. The reader might wonder what happened to the years 1969-1971, since the author once did vanish (literally) from 1944 to 1954. But not this time. The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills (Black Sparrow Press, 1969) contains the poems from late 1968 and most of 1969, plus selections from five early chapbooks not covered by the first three sections of this book. Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (Black Sparrow Press, 1972) prints poems written from late 1969 to early 1972. So, for my critics, readers, friends, enemies, ex-lovers and new lovers, the present volume along with Days and Mockingbird contain what I like to consider my best work written over the past nineteen years.

  Each of these sections brings back special memories. For It Catches My Heart In Its Hands I was required to make a trip to New Orleans. The editor first had to check me out to see if I was a decent human being. Catching the train at the Union Station just below the Terminal Annex of the Post Office where I worked for Uncle Sam, I sat in the bar car and drank scotch and water and sped toward New Orleans to be judged and measured by an ex-con who owned an ancient printing press. Jon Webb believed that most writers (and he’d met some good ones including Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner, Hemingway) were detestable human beings when they were away from their typewriters. I arrived, they met me, Jon and his wife, Louise, we drank and talked for two weeks, then Jon Webb said, “You’re a bastard, Bukowski, but I’m going to publish you anyhow.” I left town. But that wasn’t all. Soon they were both in Los Angeles with their two dogs in a green hotel just off skid row. Re-check. Drink and talk. I was still a bastard. Goodbye. Much leaving and waving through train windows. Louise cried through the glass. It Catches was published…

  The bulk of the poems in Crucifix In A Deathhand were written during one very hot, lyrical month in New Orleans in the year 1965. I’d walk down the street and I’d stagger, sober I’d stagger, hear churchbells, wounded dogs, wounded me, all that. I had gone into a slump or a blackout after the publication of It Catches, and Jon and Louise had brought me back down to New Orleans. I lived right around the corner from them with a fat, kind woman whose ex-husband (who’d died) had come very close to being welterweight or middleweight champion of the world, I forget which. Each night I went over to Jon and Louise’s and we drank until early morning at a small table in the kitchen with the roaches running up and down the wall in front of us (they particularly liked to circle around an unshaded lightbulb sticking out of the wall) as we drank and talked.

  I would go back to my place and awaken about 10:30 a.m., quite sick. I’d dress and walk over to Jon’s place. The press was below street level and I’d peek down at him before I knocked. I could see him through the window, calm, cool, hardly hungover at all, humming, and feeding pages of Cruci
fix into the press.

  “Got any poems, Bukowski?” he’d ask as I walked in. (One had to be careful: feeding poems into a waiting press can easily dissolve into journalism.)

  Jon would become downright unlaced if I didn’t have a handful of poems. It wasn’t as pleasant to be around that bastard then, and I’d find myself back in my room beating the typer. In the evening, if I brought him a little sheaf of poems, his mood would be better.

  So I kept writing poems. We drank with the roaches, the place was small, and pages 5, 6, 7 and 8 were stacked in the bathtub, nobody could bathe, and pages 1, 2, 3 and 4 were in a large trunk, and soon there wasn’t anyplace to put anything. There were 7-and-one-half foot stacks of pages everywhere. Very carefully we moved between them. The bathtub had been useful but the bed was in the way. So Jon built a little loft out of discarded lumber. Plus a stairway. And Jon and Louise slept up there on a mattress and the bed was given away. There was more floor space to stack the pages. “Bukowski, Bukowski everywhere! I am going crazy!” said Louise. The roaches circled and we drank and the press gulped my poems. A very strange time, and that was Crucifix…

  I used to go to John Thomas’ place and stay all night. We’d take pills and drink and talk. That is, John took the pills and I took the pills and drank, and we both talked. John was then in the habit of taping everything, whether it was good or bad, dull or interesting, worthless or useful. We would listen to our conversations the next day, and it was a worthwhile process, at least for me. I realized how oafish and overbearing and off-target I often was, at least when I was high. And sometimes when I wasn’t.

  At one time during these tapings John asked that I bring over some poems and read them. I did. And left the poems there and forgot about them. The poems were thrown out with the garbage. Months passed. One day Thomas phoned me. “Those poems, Bukowski, would make a good book.” “What poems, John?” He said he had taken out the tape of my poems and had listened to it again. “I’d have to type them off the tape, it’s just too much work,” I said. “I’ll type them up for you.” I agreed, and soon I had the poems back in typescript form.

  At this time a balding red-haired man with a high, scrubbed forehead, meticulous and kind, with a very faint, perpetual grin was coming by. He worked as the manager of an office furniture and supply company and was a collector of rare books. His name was John Martin. He had published some of my poems as broadsides. He wrote me out checks as I sat in my kitchen across from him, drinking beer and signing the broadsides. It was the beginning of the Black Sparrow Press, a house that was soon to begin publishing a large portion of America’s avant-garde poetry, but neither of us knew it then.

  I showed John Martin the poems Thomas had typed off the tape for me. I had checked his transcriptions, and he’d done a careful, accurate job. John Martin took the poems home with him and phoned me a couple of days later: “You have a book there and I’m going to publish it myself.” And that’s how some almost lost poems were found again and printed in book form and the Black Sparrow was flying. I called the book At Terror Street And Agony Way.

  Looking at these poems written between 1955 and 1973 I like (for one reason or another) the last poems best. I am pleased with this. I have, of course, no idea what shape my future poems will take, or even if I will write any, because I have no idea how long I will go on living, but since I began writing poetry quite late in life, at the age of 35, I like to think they’ll give me a few extra years now, at this end. Meanwhile, the poems that follow will have to do.

  Charles Bukowski

  January 30, 1974

  It Catches My Heart in Its Hands

  Poems 1955-1963

  lay down

  lay down and wait like

  an animal

  the tragedy of the leaves

  I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,

  the potted plants yellow as corn;

  my woman was gone

  and the empty bottles like bled corpses

  surrounded me with their uselessness;

  the sun was still good, though,

  and my landlady’s note cracked in fine and

  undemanding yellowness; what was needed now

  was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester

  with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd

  because it exists, nothing more;

  I shaved carefully with an old razor

  the man who had once been young and

  said to have genius; but

  that’s the tragedy of the leaves,

  the dead ferns, the dead plants;

  and I walked into a dark hall

  where the landlady stood

  execrating and final,

  sending me to hell,

  waving her fat, sweaty arms

  and screaming

  screaming for rent

  because the world had failed us

  both.

  to the whore who took my poems

  some say we should keep personal remorse from the

  poem,

  stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,

  but jezus;

  twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have

  my

  paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling:

  are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?

  why didn’t you take my money? they usually do

  from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.

  next time take my left arm or a fifty

  but not my poems:

  I’m not Shakespeare

  but sometime simply

  there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;

  there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards

  down to the last bomb,

  but as God said,

  crossing his legs,

  I see where I have made plenty of poets