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Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

my atomic stockpile

cleaned my place the other day
first time in ten years
and found 100 rejected poems:
fastened them all to a clipboard
much bad reading.
 
now I will clean their teeth
fill their cavities
give them eye and ear examinations
weigh them
offer blood transfusions
then send them out again into the
sick world of posey.
either that
or I must burn down your cities,
rape your women,
murder your men,
enslave your children.
 
every time I clean my room
the world trembles in the balance.
that’s why I only do it once every
ten years.

#1993 #AmericanWriters #ThePleasuresOfTheDamned

Other works by Charles Bukowski...
a radio with guts

it was on the 2nd floor on Coronad… I used to get drunk and throw the radio through the wi… while it was playing, and, of cour… it would break the glass in the wi…
the egg

he’s 17 . mother, he said, how do I crack an egg? all right, she said to me, you don… sit there looking like that.
notes upon the flaxen aspect:

John F. Kennedy flower knocks upo… shot through the neck; the gladiolas gather by the dozens… India dripping into Ceylon;
Post Office. Chapter II: 4

Then Joyce wanted to go back to the city. For all the draw– backs, that little town, haircuts or not, beat city life. It was quiet. We had our own house. Joyce fed me well.) Plenty of m...
on being 20

my mother knocked on my rooming-ho… and came in looked in the dresser drawer: Henry you don’t have any clean stockings?
Women: 53

On Thursday night Bobby phoned again. “Hey, man, what are you doing?” “Oh, come on, man, I’ll just stay for a few beers. . . .” “You treat him mean. He gets lonely when his wife is at w...
Women: 67

“Get a seat for her, put her on the tab,” I told Marty. “All right. We’ll set her up. We’re S.R.O. We’ve had to turn away 150 and it’s 30 minutes before you go on.” “I want to introduce...
Iron Mike

we talk about this film: Cagney fed this broad grapefruit faster than she could eat it and
Ham on Rye: 18

Frank liked airplanes. He lent me all his pulp magazines about World War 1. The best was Flying Aces. The dog-fights were great, the Spads and the Fokkers mixing it. I read all the stor...
Women: 20

Lydia returned and found a nice apartment in the Burbank area. She seemed to care a lot more for me than before we parted. “My husband had this big cock and that’s all he had. He had no...
Consummation of Grief

I even hear the mountains the way they laugh up and down their blue sides and down in the water the fish cry
 2
Warm Asses

this Friday night the Mexican girls at the Catholic… look especially good their husbands are in the bars and the Mexican girls look young
 1
Shoes, by Vincent van Gogh
shoes

when you’re young a pair of female high-heeled shoes just sitting
 3
how come you’re not unlisted?

the men phone and ask me that. are you really Charles Bukowski the writer? they ask. I’m a sometimes writer, I say, most often I don’t do anything.
The Beast

Beowulf may have killed Grendel a… Grendel’s mother but he couldn’t kill this one:



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