Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame by Charles Bukowski Read Free Book Online Page B

riding sideways
    he had the horse running in and was pulling his head back
    toward the outer rail,
    and I could tell by the way the horse was striding
    that he was out of it;
    the action had been all wrong
    and I walked to the bar
    while the winners turned into the stretch,
    and they were making the final calls as I ordered my drink,
    and I leaned there thinking
    I once knew places that sweetly cried
    their walls’ voices
    where mirrors showed me chance,
    I was once saddened when an evening became
    finally a night to sleep away.
     
     
    —the bartender said, I hear they are going to send in
    the 7 horse in the next one.
    I once sang operas and burned candles
    in a place made holy by nothing but myself
    and whatever there was.
     
     
    —I never bet mares in the summer,
    I told him.
     
     
    then the crowd came on in
    complaining
    explaining
    bragging
    thinking of suicide or drunkenness or sex,
    and I looked around
    like a man waking up in jail
    and whatever there was
    became that,
    and I finished my drink
    and walked away.
     

on going out to get the mail
     
     
    the droll noon
    where squadrons of worms creep up like
    stripteasers
    to be raped by blackbirds.
     
     
    I go outside
    and all up and down the street
    the green armies shoot color
    like an everlasting 4th of July,
    and I too seem to swell inside,
    a kind of unknown bursting, a
    feeling, perhaps, that there isn’t any
    enemy
    anywhere.
     
     
    and I reach down into the box
    and there is
    nothing—not even a
    letter from the gas co. saying they will
    shut it off
    again.
     
     
    not even a short note from my x-wife
    bragging about her present
    happiness.
     
     
    my hand searches the mailbox in a kind of
    disbelief long after the mind has
    given up.
     
     
    there’s not even a dead fly
    down in there.
     
     
    I am a fool, I think, I should have known it
    works like this.
     
     
    I go inside as all the flowers leap to
    please me.
     
     
    anything? the woman
    asks.
     
     
    nothing, I answer, what’s for
    breakfast?
     

i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody’s wife
     
     
    30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox
    and look here, they write,
    you are a dupe for the state, the church,
    you are in the ego-dream,
    read your history, study the monetary system,
    note that the racial war is 23,000 years old.
     
     
    well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor,
    his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and
    there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment
    in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow
    a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest,
    the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up,
    a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible,
    well-read, starving, depressed, but actually
    a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor,
    but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew
    and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes
    and watching the backs of houses come down in flames,
    but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough,
    large or small enough,
    or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy
    fell through,
    and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed
    with his
    wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have
    his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and
    I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom;
    but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans,
    and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars
    and then I went inside to the bars,
    and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew,
    how all he did was sew on buttons and talk,
    and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us—
    he gave way because his bladder would not go on,
    and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan
    and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the
    Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s