Essential Bukowski: Poetry. Abel Debritto

      I kneel in the nights

      before tigers

      that will not let me be.

      what you were

      will not happen again.

      the tigers have found me

      and I do not care.

john dillinger and le chasseur maudit

      it’s unfortunate, and simply not the style, but I don’t care:

      girls remind me of hair in the sink, girls remind me of intestines

      and bladders and excretory movements; it’s unfortunate also that

      ice-cream bells, babies, engine-valves, plagiostomes, palm trees,

      footsteps in the hall . . . all excite me with the cold calmness

      of the gravestone; nowhere, perhaps, is there sanctuary except

      in hearing that there were other desperate men:

      Dillinger, Rimbaud, Villon, Babyface Nelson, Seneca, Van Gogh,

      or desperate women: lady wrestlers, nurses, waitresses, whores

      poetesses . . . although,

      I do suppose the breaking out of ice-cubes is important

      or a mouse nosing an empty beercan—

      two hollow emptinesses looking into each other,

      or the nightsea stuck with soiled ships

      that enter the chary web of your brain with their lights,

      with their salty lights

      that touch you and leave you

      for the more solid love of some India;

      or driving great distances without reason

      sleep-drugged through open windows that

      tear and flap your shirt like a frightened bird,

      and always the stoplights, always red,

      nightfire and defeat, defeat . . .

      scorpions, scraps, fardels:

      x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives,

      Beethoven in his grave as dead as a beet;

      red wheel-barrows, yes, perhaps,

      or a letter from Hell signed by the devil

      or two good boys beating the guts out of each other

      in some cheap stadium full of screaming smoke,

      but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here

      with a mouthful of rotten teeth,

      sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and

      Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today);

      and listening to the Dvorak Midday Witch or Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit, actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate: I have been getting letters from a young poet (very young, it seems) telling me that some day I will most surely be recognized as one of the world’s great poets. Poet! a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being nothing, and coming back to my room I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile; she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires: telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling, and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire or the smiling of wire and I closed my door (at last) but through the windows it was the same: a horn honked, somebody laughed, a toilet flushed, and oddly then I thought of all the horses with numbers that have gone by in the screaming, gone by like Socrates, gone by like Lorca, like Chatterton . . . I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much except as a matter of disposal, a problem, like dumping the garbage, and although I have saved the young poet’s letters, I do not believe them but like at the diseased palm trees and the end of the sun, I sometimes look.