Storm for the Living and the Dead Read online

  disclaimer

  Publisher’s Note

  Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.

  Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. A little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.

  There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.

  We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.

  This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.

  —Dan Halpern, Publisher

  Contents

  cover

  title page

  disclaimer

  caught again at some impossible pass

  in this—

  why are all your poems personal?

  prayer for broken-handed lovers

  fast pace

  I think of Hemingway

  I was shit

  corrections of self, mostly after Whitman:

  the bumblebee

  warble in

  a trainride in hell

  same old thing, Shakespeare through Mailer—

  the rope of glass

  tough luck

  sometimes when I feel blue I listen to Mahler

  men’s crapper

  like a flyswatter

  take me out to the ball game

  I thought I was going to get some

  charity ward

  like that

  phone call from my 5-year-old daughter in Garden Grove

  the solar mass: soul: genesis and geotropism:

  hooked on horse

  fuck

  2 immortal poems

  T.H.I.A.L.H.

  the lesbian

  a poem to myself

  fact

  blues song

  fat upon the land

  love song

  poem for Dante

  the conditions

  29 chilled grapes

  burning in water, drowning in flame

  a cop-out to a possible immortality:

  well, now that Ezra has died . . .

  warts

  my new parents

  something about the action:

  55 beds in the same direction

  b

  finger

  the thing

  Bob Dylan

  “Texsun”

  warm water bubbles

  a corny poem

  the ladies of the afternoon

  tongue-cut

  Venice, Calif., nov. 1977:

  mirror

  head jobs

  chili and beans

  go to your grave cleanly—

  kuv stuff mox out

  a long hot day at the track

  the letters of John Steinbeck

  and the trivial lives of royalty never excited me either . . .

  letter to a friend with a domestic problem:

  agnostic

  clones

  gnawed by dull crisis

  I been working on the railroad . . .

  the way it goes

  alone in a time of armies

  going modern

  it doesn’t always work

  I have this room

  a man for the centuries

  dear old dad

  peace and love

  the world of valets

  I live to write and now I’m dying

  rip it

  Henry Miller and Burroughs

  family tree

  being here

  the only life

  stomping at the Savoy

  the glory days

  congrats, Chinaski

  he went for the windmills, yes

  all my friends

  a reader writes

  ow said the cow to the fence that linked

  my America, 1936

  1/2/93 8:43 PM

  musings

  storm for the living and the dead

  cover charge

  good stuff

  now

  quit before the sun

  #1

  song for this softly-sweeping sorrow . . .

  sources

  acknowledgments

  about the authors

  also by charles bukowski

  credits

  copyright

  about the publisher

  caught again at some impossible pass

  and the one with big feet, stupid, would not move

  when I passed thro the aisle; that night at the barn

  dance Elmer Whitefield lost a tooth fighting big

  Eddie Green;

  we’ll get his radio and we’ll get his watch, they said,

  pointing at me, damn Yankee; but they didn’t know

  I was an insane poet and I leaned there drinking wine

  and loving all their women

  with my eyes, and they were frightened and cowed

  as any small town cattle

  trying to figure out how to kill me

  but first

  foolishly

  needing a reason; I could have told them

  how not so long ago

  I had almost killed for lack of reason;

  instead, I took the 8:15 bus

  to Memphis.

  in this—

  in this, grows the word of arrow;

  we ache all through with simple terror

  while walking down a simple street

  and see where the tanks have piled it up:

  faces run through, apples live with worms

  to a squeeze of love; or out there—

  where the sailors drowned, and the sea

  washed it up, and your dog sniffed

  and ran as if his hinds had been bitten

  by the devil.

  in this, say that Dylan wept

  or Ezra craw
led with Muss

  through thin Italian hours

  as my fine brown dog

  forgot the devil

  or cathedrals shaking in sunlight’s gunfire,

  and found love easily

  upon the street outside.

  in this, it’s true: that which makes iron

  makes roses makes saints makes rapists

  makes the decay of a tooth and a nation.

  in this, a poem could be absence of word.

  the smoke that once came up to push ten tons of steel

  now lies flat and silent in an engineer’s hand.

  in this, I see Brazil in the bottom of my glass.

  I see hummingbirds—like flies, dozens of them—

  stuck in a golden net. HELL!!—I have died in Words

  like a man on a narcotic of thinning nectar!

  in this, like blue through blue without bacchanalia dreams

  where the tanks have piled it up, big boys shoot pool,

  elf-eyes through smoke and waiting:

  A CRACK AND BALLS, THAT’S ALL, ISN’T IT?

  and courses in definitive literature.

  why are all your poems personal?

  why are all your poems personal? she

  said, no wonder she hated you . . .

  which one? I said. you know

  which one . . . and don’t ever leave

  water in your sink again, and you

  can’t broil a roast; my landlady said

  you’re very handsome and she wanted to

  know why we didn’t get together

  again . . .

  did you tell her?

  could I tell her you’re conceited

  and alcoholic? could I tell her about

  the time I had to pick you up

  off your back

  when you had that fight?

  could I tell her

  you play with yourself?

  could I tell her

  you think

  you’re Mr. Vanbilderass?

  why don’t you go home?

  I’ve always loved you, you know

  I’ve always loved you!

  good. some day I’ll write a poem about

  it. a very personal

  poem.

  prayer for broken-handed lovers

  in dwarfed and towering rage, in ambulances of hate,

  stamping out the ants, stamping out the sleepless ants

  forevermore . . . pray for my horses, do not pray for me;

  pray for the fenders of my car, pray for the carbon on

  the filaments of my brain . . . exactly, and listen,

  I do not need any more love, any more wet stockings

  like legs of death crawling my face in a midnight’s

  bathroom . . . make me sightless of blood and wisdom and

  despair, don’t let me see the drying carnation

  pinking-out against my time, buttonholed and rootless

  as the tombs of memory;

  well, I’ve been bombed out of

  better places than this, I’ve had the sherry shaken

  out of my hand, I’ve seen the teeth of the piano move

  filled with explosions of rot; I’ve seen the rats in

  the fireplace

  leaping like rockets through the flames;

  pray for Germany, pray for France, pray for Russia,

  do not pray for me . . . and yet . . . and yet I can see again

  the crossing of the lovely legs, of more sherry and more

  disappointment, more bombs—surging seas of bombs,

  my paintings flying like birds amongst the earrings

  and bottles, amongst the red lips, amongst the love letters

  and the last piano, I will cry that I was right: we

  never should have been.

  fast pace

  I came in awful tired with a finger sliced off and frost

  on my feet and the lightning coming down the wallpaper;

  they hung three men in the streets and the mayor was drunk

  on candy, and they sunk the friggin’ fleet and the vultures

  were smoking Havana cigars; o.k., I see where some bathing

  beauty sliced her left wrist an’ they found her in a comatose

  state in her bedroom—probably pining her heart out for

  me, but I’ve got to move out of town: I thought I was a

  no-sweat kid, a rock, but I just found a

  grey hair above my

  left ear.

  I think of Hemingway

  I think of Hemingway sitting

  in a chair, he had a typewriter

  and now he no longer touches

  his typewriter, he has no more

  to say.

  and now Belmonte has no more

  bulls to kill, sometimes I think

  I have no more poems to write,

  no more women to love.

  I think of the form of the poem

  but my feet hurt, there is dirt

  on the windows.

  the bulls sleep nights in the

  fields, they sleep good without

  Belmonte.

  Belmonte sleeps good without

  Belmonte but I do not sleep

  so well.

  I have neither created nor

  loved for some time, I swat

  at a fly and miss, I am an

  old grey dog growing tooth-

  less.

  I have a typewriter and now

  my typewriter no longer has

  anything to say.

  I will drink until morning

  finds me in bed with the

  biggest whore of them all:

  myself.

  Belmonte & Poppa, I under-

  stand, this is the way it

  goes, truly.

  I have watched them bring

  the dirt down all morning

  to fill the holes in the

  streets. I have watched

  them put new wires on

  the poles, it rained

  last night, a very

  dry rain, it was

  not a bombing, only the

  world is ending and I am

  unable to write

  about it.

  I was shit

  grief, the walls are bloody with grief and who cares?

  a sparrow, a princess, a whore, a bloodhound?

  by god, dirt cares, dirt, and dirt I shall be,

  I’ll score a hero’s blast where heroes are all the same:

  Ezra packed next to gopher just as I,

  just as I, the faint splash of rain in the empty brain,

  o by god, the noble intentions, the lives, the sewers,

  the tables in Paris

  flaunting and floating in our swine memories,

  Havana, Cuba, Hemingway

  falling to the floor

  blood splashing all exits.

  if Hemingway kills himself

  what am I?

  if Cummings dies across his typewriter,

  if Faulkner clutches his heart and goes,

  what am I?

  what am I? what was I

  when Jeffers died in his tomb,

  his stone cocoon?

  I was shit, shit, shit, shit.

  I now fall to the floor and raise the last of myself

  what’s left of myself

  I promise grails filled with words as well as wine,

  and the green, and the shade flapping,

  all this is nothing,

  God shaving in my bathroom,

  rent due,

  lightning breaking the backs of ants,

  I must close in upon myself,

  I must stop playing tricks for

  deep inside

  somewhere

  above the nuts or

  below or in that head

  not yet crushed

  eyes looking out like damned and impossible fires,

  I see the gap I must leap, and I will be strong
>
  and I will be kind, I have always been kind,

  animals love me as if I were a child crayoning

  the edges of the world,

  sparrows walk right by, flies crawl under my eyelids,

  I cannot hurt anything

  but myself,

  I cannot even in the bloody grief

  scream;

  this is more than a scripture inside my brain—

  I am tossed along the avenues of trail and trial

  like dice

  the gods mouthing their fires of strength

  and I

  must not die,

  yet.

  corrections of self, mostly after Whitman:

  I would break the boulevards like straws

  and put old rattled poets who sip milk

  and lift weights

  into the drunk tanks from Iowa

  to San Diego;

  I would announce my own firm intention to immortality

  quietly

  since nobody would listen anyway,

  and I would break the Victrola

  I would break the soul of Caruso

  on a warm night full of flies;

  I would go hymie-ass

  shifting it up the boulevards

  on an old Italian racing bike,

  glancing backwards

  always knowing

  like goodnights in Germany

  or gloves thrown down,

  it happens.

  I would cry for the armies of Spain,

  I would cry for Indians gone to wine,

  I would cry, even, for Gable dead

  if I could find a tear;

  I would write introductions to books of poetry

  of young men gone half-daft

  with the word;

  I would kill an elephant with a bowie knife

  to see his trunk fall

  like an empty stocking.

  I would find things in sand and things

  under my bed: teeth-marks, arm-marks, signs,

  tips, paint-stains, love-stains, scratchings

  of Swinburne . . .

  I would break the mountains for their olive pits,

  I would keen dead-nosed divers

  with ways to go,

  and as it happens

  I would swat and kill one more fly

  or write

  one more useless poem.

  the bumblebee

  she dressed like a bumblebee,

  black stripes on yellow,

  and clish clish slitch went

  the gun, the gun was always there,