the young lady who lives in Canoga Park
she only fucks the ones she doesn’t want
to marry.
to the others she says
you’ve got to marry me.
or maybe she just fucks the ones she wants
to fuck?
she talks about it freely
and lives in the apartment at the end
with a 9-year-old red-haired boy
and a 7-month-old baby.
she gets child support
and when she works
she works in the factories or as a
cocktail waitress.
she has a boyfriend 60 years old
who drinks a jug of wine a day
has a bad leg
and lives at the YMCA.
she smokes dope, mostly grass,
takes pills
wears large dark glasses
and talks talks talks
while not looking at you and
twisting a long beaded necklace with her thin
nervous fingers.
she has a neck like a swan,
could be a movie star,
twice in the mad house,
mother in the mad house,
and a sister in prison.
you never know when she is going to
go mad again and
throw tiny fits
and 3 a.m. phone calls at you.
the kids trundle about the apartment
and she fucks and doesn’t fuck,
has an exercise chart on her wall
bends this way and that
touches her toes
leaps
stretches and so
forth. she goes from dope to religion
and from religion back to dope and
from black guys to white guys and from white to
black again.
when she takes off those dark glasses
her eyes are blue
and she tries to smile
as she twists that necklace
around and around.
there are 3 keys on the end of it:
her car key
her apartment key
and one that I’ve never
asked her about.
she’s not given up,
she’s not dead yet,
she’s hardly even old,
her air conditioner doesn’t
work and that’s really all I know
about her because I’m one of those
she wants to
marry.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
