Essential Bukowski: Poetry

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.