Essential Bukowski: Poetry

they will not

give her back to me.

for Jane (#ulink_9d204e78-fe9c-5dea-a5c0-29c5e54fe74b)

225 days under grass

and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,

you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room

the hours of love

still make shadows.

when you left

you took almost

everything.

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 (#ulink_04b07df9-3867-59f9-b524-d615d59b555b)

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