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Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

I am eaten by butterflies

maybe I’ll win the Irish Sweepstakes
maybe I’ll go nuts
maybe Harcourt Brace will call
or maybe unemployment insurance or
rich lesbian at the top of a hill.
 
maybe reincarnation as a frog...
or $70,000 found floating in a plastic sack
in the bathtub.
 
need help
am a thin man being eaten by
green trees
butterflies and
you.
 
turn turn
light the lamp
my teeth ache the teeth of my soul ache
can’t sleep I
pray for the dead
the white mice
engines on fire
blood on a green gown in an operating room
and I am caught
ow ow
wild: my body being there filled with nothing but
me
me caught halfway between suicide and
old age
hustling in factories next to the
young boys
 
keeping pace
burning my blood like gasoline and
making the foreman
grin.
 
my poems are only bits of scratchings
on the floor of a
cage.

#1993 #AmericanWriters #ThePleasuresOfTheDamned

Other works by Charles Bukowski...
coupons

cigarettes wetted with beer from the night before you light one gag open the door for air
Scarlet

I’m glad when they arrive and I’m glad when they leave I’m glad when I hear their heels approaching my door and I’m glad when those heels
Post Office. Chapter III: 15

They had me in the counselor’s office in one of the back rooms of the second floor. “Let me see how you look, Chinaski.” He looked at me. “All right, Mr. Chinaski, we’d like to know whe...
problems about the other woman

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…
something

I’m out of matches. the springs in my couch are broken. they stole my footlocker. they stole my oil painting of
Women: 39

The next night Bobby and Valerie came over. They had recently moved into my apartment building and now lived across the court. Bobby had on his tight knit shirt. Everything always fitte...
after the reading:

“...I’ve seen people in front of their typewriters in such a bind that it would blow their intestine… right out of their assholes if the… were trying to shit.”
Women: 37

I took women either to the boxing matches or to the racetrack. That Thursday night I took Katherine to the boxing matches at the Olympic auditorium. She had never been to a live fight. ...
the spider

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.
the veryest

here comes the fishhead singing here comes the baked potato in dra… here comes nothing to do all day l… here comes another night of no sle… here comes the phone ringing the w…
love is a dog from hell

feet of cheese coffeepot soul hands that hate poolsticks eyes like paperclips I prefer red wine
harbor freeway south

the dead dogs of nowhere bark as you approach another traffic accident. cars one standing on its
Throwing Away the Alarm Clock

my father always said, “early to b… early to rise makes a man healthy,… and wise.” it was lights out at 8 p.m. in our… and we were up at dawn to the smel…
 14
Ham on Rye: 40

R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer Training Corps) was for the misfits. Like I said, it was either that or gym. I would have taken gym but I didn’t want people to sec the boils on my back. There...
Women: 77

A month went by. R.A. Dwight, the editor of Dogbite Press wrote and asked me to do a foreword to Keesing’s Selected Poems. Keesing, with the help of his death, was at last going to get ...



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