I mean, I just slept
I awoke with a fly on my elbow and
I named the fly Benny
then I killed him
and then I got up and looked in the
mailbox
and there was some kind of warning from the
government
but since there wasn’t anybody standing in the bushes with
a bayonet
I tore it up
and went back to bed and looked up at the ceiling
and I thought, I really like this,
I’m just going to lie here for another ten
minutes
and I lay there for another ten minutes
and I thought,
it doesn’t make sense, I’ve got so many things to
do but I’m going to lie here another
half hour,
and I stretched
stretched
and I watched the sun through the small leaves of a tree
outside, and I didn’t have any wonderful thoughts,
I didn’t have any immortal thoughts,
and that was the best part
and it got a little hot
and I threw the blankets off and slept—
but a damned dream:
I was on the train again
on that same 5 hour round-trip to the track,
sitting by the window,
past the same sad ocean, China out there mouthing
peculiarities in the back of my
brain, and then somebody sat next to me
and talked about horses
mothballs of talk that ripped me apart like
death, and then I was there
again: the horses running like something shown on
a screen and the jockeys very white in the face
and it didn’t matter who finally
won and everybody knew
it, the ride back in the dream was the same as the ride
back in reality:
black tons of night around
the same mountains ashamed of being
there, the sea again, again,
the train heading like a cock through a needle’s
eye
and I had to get up and go to the urinal
and I hated to get up and go to the urinal
because somebody had thrown paper, some loser had thrown paper
into the toilet again and it wouldn’t
flush, and when I came back out
everybody had nothing to do but look at my
face
and I am so tired
that they know when they see my face
that I hate
them
and then they hate me
and want to
kill me
but don’t.
I woke up but since there wasn’t anybody over my bed
to tell me I was doing
wrong
I slept some
more.
when I woke up this time
it was almost
evening. people were coming in from work.
I got up and sat in a chair and watched them
coming in. they didn’t look so good.
even the young girls didn’t look so good as when they
left.
and the men came in: hatchet men, killers, thieves, con-men,
the whole bunch, and their faces were more horrible than any
halloween masks ever devised.
I found a blue spider in the corner and killed him with a
broom.
I looked at the people a while more and then I got tired and
stopped looking and fried myself a couple of eggs and sat down
and had some tea and bread with it.
I felt fine.
then I took a bath and went back to bed.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
