first time my father overheard me listening to
this bit of music he asked me,
“what is it?”
“it’s called Love For Three Oranges,”
I informed him.
“boy,”
he said,
“that’s getting it cheap.”
he meant sex.
listening to it
I always imagined three oranges
sitting there,
you know how orange they can
get,
so mightily orange.
maybe Prokofiev had meant
what my father
thought.
if so, I preferred it the
other way
the most horrible thing
I could think of
was part of me being
what ejaculated out

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but

don’t undress my love
you might find a mannequin:
don’t undress the mannequin
you might find
my love.
-Trapped by Charles Bukowski

they found him walking along the freeway
all red in front
he had taken a rusty tin can
and cut off his sexual machinery
as if to say
see what you’ve done to
me? you might as well have the rest.
and he put part of him
in one pocket and
part of him in another
and that’s how they found him,
walking along.
they gave him over to the doctors
who tried to sew the parts back on
but the parts

what i liked about e.e. cummings
was that he cut away from
the holiness of the
word
and with charm
and gamble
gave us lines
that sliced through the
dung.
how it was needed!
how we were withering
away
in the old
tired
manner.
of course, then came all
the e.e. cummings
copyists.
they copied him then
as the others had
copied Keats, Shelly,
Swinburne, Byron, et
al.
but there was only
one
e.e. cummings.
of course.
one sun.
one moon.
-What A

at their best, there is gentleness in Humanity.
some understanding and, at times, acts of
courage
but all in all it is a mass, a glob that doesn’t
have too much.
it is like a large animal deep in sleep and
almost nothing can awaken it.
when activated it’s best at brutality,
selfishness, unjust judgments, murder.
-What Can We Do? by Charles Bukowski

They don’t make it
the beautiful die in flame-
suicide pills, rat poison, rope what-
ever…
they rip their arms off,
throw themselves out of windows,
they pull their eyes out of the sockets,
reject love
reject hate
reject, reject.
they don’t make it
the beautiful can’t endure,
they are butterflies
they are doves
they are sparrows,
they don’t make it.
one tall shot of flame
while the old men play checkers in the park
one flame, one good flame
while the old men play checkers in the

Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.
-Working Out by Charles Bukowski

often it is the only
thing
between you and
impossibility.
no drink,
no woman’s love,
no wealth
can
match it.
-Writing by Charles Bukowski

when God created love he didn’t help most
when God created dogs He didn’t help dogs
when God created plants that was average
when God created hate we had a standard utility
when God created me He created me
when God created the monkey He was asleep
when He created the giraffe He was drunk
when He created narcotics He was high

and when He created suicide He was low
when He created you lying in bed
He knew

starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except