The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski Read Free Book Online

exceptional
    without ever meeting one person
    truly good
 
    gliding into old age
 
    the decades gone
 
    the mornings are the worst.

in error
     
     
    a warrior
    I come in from a long but
    victorious day
    at the track.
 
    she greets me with some
    trash
    which I carry and dump
    into the garbage
    can.
 
    “Jesus Christ,” she says,
    “push the lid down tight!
    the ants will be
    everywhere! ”
 
    I push the lid down tight.
 
    I think of Amsterdam.
    I think of pigeons flying from a
    roof.
    I think of Time dangling from
    a
    paper clip.
 
    she’s right, of course: the lid
    should be
    tight.
 
    I walk slowly back
    into
    the
    house.

confession
     
     
    waiting for death
    like a cat
    that will jump on the
    bed
 
    I am so very sorry for
    my wife
 
    she will see this
    stiff
    white
    body
 
    shake it once, then
    maybe
    again:
 
    “Hank!”
 
    Hank won’t
    answer.
 
    it’s not my death that
    worries me, it’s my wife
    left with this
    pile of
    nothing.
 
    I want to
    let her know
    though
    that all the nights
    sleeping
    beside her
 
    even the useless
    arguments
    were things
    ever splendid
 
    and the hard
    words
    I ever feared to
    say
    can now be
    said:
 
    I love
    you.

mugged
     
     
    finished,
    can’t find the handle,
    mugged in the backalleys of nowhere,
    too many dark days and nights,
    too many unkind noons, plus a
    steady fixation for
    the ladies of death.
 
    I am
    finished. roll me
    up, package
    me,
    toss me
    to the birds of Normandy or the
    gulls of Santa Monica, I
    no longer
    read
    I
    no longer
    breed,
    I
    talk to old men over quiet
    fences.
 
    is this where my suicide complex
    uncomplexes?:
    as
    I am asked over the telephone:
    did you ever know Kerouac?
 
    I now allow cars to pass me on the freeway.
    I haven’t been in a fist fight for 15 years.
    I have to get up and piss 3 times a night.
 
    and when I see a sexpot on the street I
    only see
    trouble.
    I am
    finished, back to square one,
    drinking alone and listening to classical
    music.
 
    much about dying is getting ready.
    the tiger walks through my dreams.
    the cigarette in my mouth just exploded.
 
    curious things still do
    occur.
 
    no, I never knew Kerouac.
 
    so you see:
    my life wasn’t
    useless
    after
    all.

the writer
     
     
    when I think of the things I endured trying to be a
    writer—all those rooms in all those cities,
    nibbling on tiny bits of food that wouldn’t
    keep a rat
    alive.
 
    I was so thin I could slice bread with my
    shoulderblades, only I seldom had
    bread…
    meanwhile, writing things down
    again and again
    on pieces of paper.
 
    and when I moved from one place to
    another
    my cardboard suitcase was just
    that: paper outside stuffed with
    paper inside.
    each new landlady would
    ask, “what do you
    do?”
 
    “I’m a writer.”
 
    “oh…”
 
    as I settled into tiny rooms to evoke my
    craft
    many of them pitied me, gave me little
    tidbits like apples, walnuts,
    peaches…
    little did they know
    that that
    was about all that I
    ate.
    but their pity ended when
    they found cheap wine bottles in my
    place.
 
    it’s all right to be a starving writer
    but not
    a starving writer who
    drinks.
    drunks are never forgiven
    anything.
 
    but when the world is closing in very
    fast
    a bottle of wine seems a very
    reasonable friend.
 
    ah. all those landladies,
    most of them heavy, slow, their husbands
    long dead, I can still see those
    dears
    climbing up and down the stairways of
    their world.
 
    they ruled my very existence:
    without them allowing me
    an extra week on the rent
    now and then,
    I was out on the
    street
 
    and I couldn’t WRITE
    on the street.
    it was very important to have a
    room, a door, those
    walls.
 
    oh, those dark mornings
    in those beds
    listening to their footsteps
    listening to them cough
    hearing the flushing of their
    toilets, smelling the cooking of
    their food
    while waiting
    for some word
    on my submissions to New York City
    and the world,
    my submissions to those