The Pleasures of the Damned Read online

  I saw it crawl under a yellow car

  with the bird

  to bargain it to another place.

  summer was over.

  something’s knocking at the door

  a great white light dawns across the

  continent

  as we fawn over our failed traditions,

  often kill to preserve them

  or sometimes kill just to kill.

  it doesn’t seem to matter: the answers dangle just

  out of reach,

  out of hand, out of mind.

  the leaders of the past were insufficient,

  the leaders of the present are unprepared.

  we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.

  it is a waiting without hope, more like

  a prayer for unmerited grace.

  it all looks more and more like the same old

  movie.

  the actors are different but the plot’s the same:

  senseless.

  we should have known, watching our fathers.

  we should have known, watching our mothers.

  they did not know, they too were not prepared to

  teach.

  we were too naive to ignore their

  counsel

  and now we have embraced their

  ignorance as our

  own.

  we are them, multiplied.

  we are their unpaid debts.

  we are bankrupt

  in money and

  in spirit.

  there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the

  edge

  and will

  at any moment

  tumble down to join the rest

  of us,

  the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly

  corrupt.

  a great white light dawns across the

  continent,

  the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,

  as grotesque and ultimately

  unlivable

  our 21st century

  struggles to beborn.

  his wife, the painter

  There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,

  and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like

  insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,

  says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.

  “I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are at work.”

  He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he

  fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like

  a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.

  He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than

  his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he

  self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.

  Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.) Paris,

  Bibliothe`que Nationale.

  “She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”

  “What is it? A love affair?”

  “Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”

  I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a

  lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,

  and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that

  clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…

  men drive cars and paint their houses,

  but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.

  Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.

  Paris, Louvre

  “I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”

  “Are you still reading Freud?”

  “Page 299.”

  She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one

  arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the

  snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve

  time and the dog.

  About church: the trouble with a mask is it

  never changes.

  So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.

  So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs

  and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the

  wind like the end of a tunnel.

  He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some

  segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.

  When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches

  warmer and more blood-real than the dove.

  Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.

  Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.

  He burned away in sleep.

  on the sidewalk and in the sun

  I have seen an old man around town recently

  carrying an enormous pack.

  he uses a walking stick

  and moves up and down the streets

  with this pack strapped to his back.

  I keep seeing him.

  if he’d only throw that pack away, I think,

  he’d have a chance, not much of a chance

  but a chance.

  and he’s in a tough district—east Hollywood.

  they aren’t going to give him a

  dry bone in east Hollywood.

  he is lost. with that pack.

  on the sidewalk and in the sun.

  god almighty, old man, I think, throw away that

  pack.

  then I drive on, thinking of my own

  problems.

  the last time I saw him he was not walking.

  it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent,

  the pack still strapped to his back.

  I slowed down to look at his face.

  I had seen one or two other men in my life

  with looks on their faces like

  that.

  I speeded up and turned on the

  radio.

  I knew that look.

  I would never see him again.

  the elephants of Vietnam

  first they used to, he told me,

  gun and bomb the elephants,

  you could hear their screams over all the other sounds;

  but you flew high to bomb the people,

  you never saw it,

  just a little flash from way up

  but with the elephants

  you could watch it happen

  and hear how they screamed;

  I’d tell my buddies, listen, you guys

  stop that,

  but they just laughed

  as the elephants scattered

  throwing up their trunks (if they weren’t blown off )

  opening their mouths

  wide and

  kicking their dumb clumsy legs

  as blood ran out of big holes in their bellies.

  then we’d fly back,

  mission completed.

  we’d get everything:

  convoys, dumps, bridges, people, elephants and

  all the rest.

  he told me later, I

  felt bad about the

  elephants.

  dark night poem

  they say that

  nothing is wasted:

  either that

  or

  it all is.

  (uncollected)

  the last days of the suicide kid

  I can see myself now

  after all these suicide days and nights,

  being wheeled out of one of those sterile rest homes

  (of course, this is only if I get famous and lucky)

  by a subnormal and bored nurse…

  there I am sitting upright in my wheelchair…

  almost blind, eyes rolling backward into the dark part of my skull looking

  for th
e mercy of death…

  “Isn’t it a lovely day, Mr. Bukowski?”

  “O, yeah, yeah…”

  the children walk past and I don’t even exist

  and lovely women walk by

  with big hot hips

  and warm buttocks and tight hot everything

  praying to be loved

  and I don’t even

  exist…

  “It’s the first sunlight we’ve had in 3 days,

  Mr. Bukowski.”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah.”

  there I am sitting upright in my wheelchair,

  myself whiter than this sheet of paper,

  bloodless,

  brain gone, gamble gone, me, Bukowski,

  gone…

  “Isn’t it a lovely day, Mr. Bukowski?”

  “O, yeah, yeah…” pissing in my pajamas, slop drooling out of

  my mouth.

  2 young schoolboys run by—

  “Hey, did you see that old guy?”

  “Christ, yes, he made me sick!”

  after all the threats to do so

  somebody else has committed suicide for me

  at last.

  the nurse stops the wheelchair, breaks a rose from a nearby bush, puts it in my hand.

  I don’t even know

  what it is. it might as well be my pecker

  for all the good

  it does.

  tabby cat

  he has on blue jeans and tennis shoes

  and walks with two young girls

  about his age.

  every now and then he leaps

  into the air and

  clicks his heels together.

  he’s like a young colt

  but somehow he also reminds me

  more of a tabby cat.

  his ass is soft and

  he has no more on his mind

  than a gnat.

  he jumps along behind his girls

  clicking his heels together.

  then he pulls the hair of one

  runs over to the other and

  squeezes her neck.

  he has fucked both of them and

  is pleased with himself.

  it has all happened

  so easily for him.

  and I think, ah,

  my little tabby cat

  what nights and days

  wait for you.

  your soft ass

  will be your doom.

  your agony

  will be endless

  and the girls

  who are yours now

  will soon belong to other men

  who didn’t get their cookies

  and cream so easily and

  so early.

  the girls are practicing on you

  the girls are practicing for other men

  for someone out of the jungle

  for someone out of the lion cage.

  I smile as

  I watch you walking along

  clicking your heels together.

  my god, boy, I fear for you

  on that night

  when you first find out.

  it’s a sunny day now.

  jump

  while you

  can.

  metamorphosis

  a girlfriend came in

  built me a bed

  scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor

  scrubbed the walls

  vacuumed

  cleaned the toilet

  the bathtub

  scrubbed the bathroom floor

  and cut my toenails and

  my hair.

  then

  all on the same day

  the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet

  and the toilet

  and the gas man fixed the heater

  and the phone man fixed the phone.

  now I sit here in all this perfection.

  it is quiet.

  I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends.

  I felt better when everything was in

  disorder.

  it will take me some months to get back to

  normal:

  I can’t even find a roach to commune with.

  I have lost my rhythm.

  I can’t sleep.

  I can’t eat.

  I have been robbed of

  my filth.

  a poem is a city

  a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers

  filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,

  filled with banality and booze,

  filled with rain and thunder and periods of

  drought, a poem is a city at war,

  a poem is a city asking a clock why,

  a poem is a city burning,

  a poem is a city under guns

  its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,

  a poem is a city where God rides naked

  through the streets like Lady Godiva,

  where dogs bark at night, and chase away

  the flag; a poem is a city of poets,

  most of them quite similar

  and envious and bitter…

  a poem is this city now,

  50 miles from nowhere,

  9:09 in the morning,

  the taste of liquor and cigarettes,

  no police, no lovers, walking the streets,

  this poem, this city, closing its doors,

  barricaded, almost empty,

  mournful without tears, aging without pity,

  the hardrock mountains,

  the ocean like a lavender flame,

  a moon destitute of greatness,

  a small music from broken windows…

  a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,

  a poem is the world…

  and now I stick this under glass

  for the mad editor’s scrutiny,

  and night is elsewhere

  and faint gray ladies stand in line,

  dog follows dog to estuary,

  the trumpets bring on gallows

  as small men rant at things

  they cannot do.

  a smile to remember

  we had goldfish and they circled around and around

  in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes

  covering the picture window and

  my mother, always smiling, wanting us all

  to be happy, told me, “be happy, Henry!”

  and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you

  can

  but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while

  raging inside his 6-foot-2 frame because he couldn’t

  understand what was attacking him from within.

  my mother, poor fish,

  wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a

  week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!

  why don’t you ever smile?”

  and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the

  saddest smile I ever saw.

  one day the goldfish died, all five of them,

  they floated on the water, on their sides, their

  eyes still open,

  and when my father got home he threw them to the cat

  there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother

  smiled.

  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

&nb
sp; 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