is the slim tall ear-ringed bedroom damsel dressed in a long gown
you’re a beast, she said your big white belly and those hairy feet. you never cut your nails and you have fat hands
I’m big I suppose that’s why my women alwa… small but this 6 foot goddess who deals in real estate
you sit on the couch with me tonight new woman. have you seen the
“you know,” she said, “you were at the bar so you didn’t see but I danced with this guy. we danced and we danced close.
it beats love because there aren’t… wounds: in the morning she turns on the radio, Brahms or… or Stravinsky or Mozart. she boil… eggs counting the seconds out loud…
I was coming off an affair that ha… frankly, I was sliding down into a… really feeling shitty and low when I lucked into this lady with… covered with a jeweled canopy
she wore a platinum blond wig and her face was rouged and powder… and she put the lipstick on making a huge painted mouth and her neck was wrinkled
I got his ashes, she said, and I… out to sea and I scattered his ash… they didn’t even look like ashes and the urn was weighted with
she pulled her dress off over her head and I saw the panties indented somewhat into the crotch.
women don’t know how to love, she told me. you know how to love but women just want to leech.
another bed another woman more curtains another bathroom another kitchen
don’t undress my love you might find a mannequin: don’t undress the mannequin you might find my love.
“your poems about the girls will s… 50 years from now when the girls a… my editor phones me. dear editor: the girls appear to be gone
escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she’ll embrace you
our marriage book, it says. I look through it. they lasted ten years. they were young once.
she’s from Texas and weighs 103 pounds and stands before the mirror combing oceans of reddish hair
then there was the time in New Orleans I was living with a fat woman, Marie, in the French Quarter and I got very sick.
I tried it standing up this time. it doesn’t usually work. this time it seemed
she writes: you’ll be moaning and groaning in your poems about how I fucked those 2 guys last week.
I see you drinking at a fountain w… blue hands, no, your hands are not… they are small, and the fountain i… where you wrote me that last lette… I answered and never heard from yo…
these women are supposed to come and see me but they never do. there’s the one with the long scar…
I had worked my charms on her for a couple of nights in a bar— not that we were new lovers, I had loved her for 16 months but she didn’t want to come to my…
she lived in Galveston and was int… T.M. and I went down to visit her and w… continually even though it was ver… weather
I heard it first while screwing a… who had the biggest box in Scranton. I listened to it again as I wrote… to my mother
she cut my toenails the night befo… and in the morning she said, “I th… just lay here all day.” which meant she wasn’t going to wo… she was at my apartment—which mean…
you go for these wenches, she said… you go for these whores, I’ll bore you. I don’t want to be shit on anymore… I said,
we were in bed and she started to fight: “you son of a bitch! you just wait… I’ll get you!” I began laughing:
she drives into the parking lot wh… I am leaning up against the fender… she’s drunk and her eyes are wet w… “you son of a bitch, you fucked me… didn’t want to. you told me to kee…
I know a woman who keeps buying puzzles Chinese puzzles blocks
horses running with her miles away laughing with a fool Bach and the hydrogen bomb
we’d had any number of joints and… beer and I was on the bed stretche… and she said, “look, I’ve had 3 ab… in a row, real fast, and I’m sick… abortions, I don’t want you to sti…
“I’ve made it,” she said, “I’ve c… through.” she had on new boots, pa… and a white sweater. “I know what… want now.” she was from Chicago an… had settled in L.A.’s Fairfax dis…
all I’ve ever known are whores, ex… madwomen. I see men with quiet, gentle women—I see them in the sup… I see them walking down the street… I see them in their apartments: pe…
I know that some night in some bedroom soon my fingers will rift
this poet he’d been drinking 2 or 3 days and he walked out on the stage and looked at that audience and he just knew he was going to do it. there was a grand piano on stage and he walke...
big sloppy wounded dog hit by a car and walking toward the curbing making enormous sounds
Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a whore;
we talk about this film: Cagney fed this broad grapefruit faster than she could eat it and
big black beard tells me that I don’t feel terror I look at him
sitting with the professors we talk about Allen Tate and John Crow Ransom the rugs are clean and the coffeetables shine
don’t worry about rejections, pard… I’ve been rejected before. sometimes you make a mistake, taki… the wrong poem
you’ve got to fuck a great many wo… beautiful women and write a few decent love poems. and don’t worry about age and/or freshly-arrived talents.
drinking 15 dollar champagne— Cordon Rouge—with the hookers. one is named Georgia and she doesn’t like pantyhose: I keep helping her pull up
the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break
they’d come around and they’d ask “you finished your 2nd novel yet?” “no.”
this is my piano. the phone rings and people ask, what are you doing? how about getting drunk with us? and I say,
she sits up there drinking wine while her husband is at work. she puts quite
the cockroach crouched against the tile while I was pissing and as I turned my head he hauled his butt
I was shacked with a 24 year old girl from New York City for two weeks—about the time of the garbage
listening to Bruckner on the radio wondering why I’m not half mad over the latest breakup with my latest girlfriend wondering why I’m not driving the…
the old folks play a game in the park overlooking the sea shoving markers across cement with wooden sticks. four play, two on each side
I get many phonecalls now. They are all alike. “are you Charles Bukowski, the writer?” “yes,” I tell them.
they photograph you on your porch and on your couch and standing in the courtyard or leaning against your car these photographers
the blue pencil of the wave shots of yellow road a steering wheel an insane woman sitting next to you
I have a saying, “the tough ones a… back.” but Vera was kinder than most, and so I was surprised when she arrived that night
in the hospitals and jails it’s the worst in madhouses it’s the worst in penthouses
cigarettes wetted with beer from the night before you light one gag open the door for air
what’s bad about all this is watching people drinking coffee and waiting. I would
a single dog walking alone on a hot sidewalk of summer appears to have the power of ten thousand gods.