Deathbed Blues
if you can’t stand the heat, he says, get out of the
kitchen. you know who said that?
Harry Truman.
I’m not in the kitchen, I say, I’m in the
oven.
my editor is a difficult man.
I sometimes phone him in moments of doubt.
look, he answers, you’ll be lighting cigars with ten dollar
bills, you’ll have a redhead on one arm and a blonde
on the other.
other times he’ll say, look, I think I’m going to hire
V.K. as my associate editor. we’ve got to prune off
5 poets here somewhere. I’m going to leave it up
to him. (V.K. is a very imaginative poet who believes I’ve
knifed him from N.Y.C. to the shores of Hawaii.)
look, kid, I phone my editor, can you speak German?
no, he says.
well, anyhow, I say, I need some good new tires, cheap.
so you know where I can get some good new tires, cheap?
I’ll phone you in 30 minutes, he says, will you be in
in 30 minutes?
I can’t afford to go anywhere, I say.
he says, they say you were drunk at that reading
in Oregon.
ugly gossips, I answer.
were you?
I don’t
remember.
one day he phones me:
you’re not hitting the ball anymore. you are hitting the
bottle and fighting with all these
women. you know we got a good kid on the bench,
he’s aching to get in there
he hits from both sides of the plate
he can catch anything that ain’t hit over the wall
he’s coached by Duncan, Creeley, Wakoski
and he can rhyme, he knows
images, similes, metaphors, figures, conceits,
assonance, alliteration, metrics, yes
metrics like, you know—
iambic, trochaic, anapestic, spondaic,
he knows caesura, denotation, connotation, personification,
diction, voice, paradox, rhetoric, tone and
coalescence...
holy shit, I say, hang up and take a good hit of
Old Grandad. Harry’s still alive
according to the papers. but I decide rather than
getting new tires to get
a set of retreads instead.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
