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.

I had been sleeping on a terrible mattress with the springs sticking into me for several years. That afternoon when I awakened I pulled the mattress off the bed, dragged it outside, and...

my grandfather was a tall German with a strange smell on his breath… he stood very straight in front of his small house and his wife hated him

they stop out front here looks as if the car is on fire the smoke blazes blue from the hoo… the motor sounds like cannon shots the car humps wildly

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.

swans die in the Spring too and there it floated dead on a Sunday sideways circling in the current

I only met one student at City College that I liked, Robert Becker. He wanted to be a writer. “I’m going to learn everything there is to learn about writing. It will be like taking a ca...

shot off his left ear then his right, and then tore off his belt buckle with hot lead, and then

I looked for a job all summer and couldn’t find one. Jimmy Hatcher caught on at an aircraft plant. Hitler was acting up in Europe and creating jobs for the unemployed. I had been with J...

The 5th grade was a little better. The other students seemed less hostile and I was growing larger physically. I still wasn’t chosen for the homeroom teams but I was threatened less. Da...

I get many phonecalls now. They are all alike. “are you Charles Bukowski, the writer?” “yes,” I tell them.

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...