The Pleasures of the Damned. Charles Bukowski

a smile to remember

      we had goldfish and they circled around and around

       in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes

       covering the picture window and

       my mother, always smiling, wanting us all

       to be happy, told me, “be happy, Henry!”

       and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you can

       but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while

       raging inside his 6-foot-2 frame because he couldn’t

       understand what was attacking him from within.

      my mother, poor fish,

       wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a

       week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile! why don’t you ever smile?” and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.

      one day the goldfish died, all five of them,

       they floated on the water, on their sides, their

       eyes still open,

       and when my father got home he threw them to the cat

       there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother

       smiled.

       a free 25-page booklet

      dying for a beer dying

       for and of life

       on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

       listening to symphony music from my little red radio

       on the floor.

      a friend said,

       “all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk

       and lay down

       somebody will pick you up

       somebody will take care of you.”

      I look out the window at the sidewalk

       I see something walking on the sidewalk

       she wouldn’t lay down there,

       only in special places for special people with special $$$$

       and

       special ways

       while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in

       Hollywood,

       nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the

       sidewalk

       moving it past your famished window

       she’s dressed in the finest cloth

       she doesn’t care what you say

       how you look what you do

       as long as you do not get in her

       way, and it must be that she doesn’t shit or

       have blood

       she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.

      I am too sick to lay down

       the sidewalks frighten me

       the whole damned city frightens me,

       what I will become

       what I have become

       frightens me.

      ah, the bravado is gone

       the big run through center is gone

       on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

       my radio cracks and spits its dirty music

       through a floor full of empty beerbottles.

      now I hear a siren

       it comes closer

       the music stops

       the man on the radio says,

       “we will send you a free 25-page booklet:

       FACE THE FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE COSTS.”

      the siren fades into the cardboard mountains

       and I look out the window again as the clasped fist of

       boiling cloud comes down—

       the wind shakes the plants outside

       I wait for evening I wait for night I wait sitting in a chair

       by the window—

       the cook drops in the live

       red-pink salty

       rough-tit crab and

       the game works

       on

       come get me.

       they, all of them, know

      ask the sidewalk painters of Paris

       ask the sunlight on a sleeping dog

       ask the 3 pigs

       ask the paperboy

       ask the music of Donizetti

       ask the barber

       ask the murderer

       ask the man leaning against a wall

       ask the preacher

       ask the maker of cabinets

       ask the pickpocket or the pawnbroker or the glass blower or the seller of manure or the dentist

       ask the revolutionist

       ask the man who sticks his head in the mouth of a lion

       ask the man who will release the next atom bomb

       ask the man who thinks he’s Christ

       ask the bluebird who comes home at night

       ask the peeping Tom

       ask the man dying of cancer

       ask the man who needs a bath

       ask the man with one leg

       ask the blind

       ask the man with the lisp

       ask the opium eater

       ask the trembling surgeon

       ask the leaves you walk upon

       ask a rapist or a streetcar conductor or an old man pulling weeds in his garden

       ask a bloodsucker

       ask a trainer of fleas

       ask a man who eats fire

       ask the most miserable man you can find in his most miserable moment

       ask a teacher of judo

       ask a rider of elephants

       ask a leper, a lifer, a lunger

       ask a professor of history

       ask the man who never cleans his fingernails

       ask a clown or ask the first face you see in the light of day

       ask your father

       ask your son and his son to be

       ask me

       ask a burned-out bulb in a paper sack

       ask the tempted, the damned, the foolish the wise, the slavering

       ask the builders of temples

       ask the men who have never worn shoes

       ask Jesus

       ask the moon

       ask the shadows in the closet

       ask the moth, the monk, the madman