Charles Bukowski - "90 minutes of hell"

Readings of some of his stuff.

"Coffee hot enough to know your tongue is still there"

"Now I am up and, as the novelist would say, drunk."

Charles Bukowski - "the bluebird"

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be sad.

then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Charles Bukowski - "the word"

there was Auden, I don't remember
which small room I first read him
in
and there was Spender and I don't
know which small room
either
and then there was Ezra
and I remember that room
there was a torn screen
that the flies came through
and it was Los Angeles
and the woman said to me,
"Jesus Christ, you reading those
Cantos again!"
she liked e. e. cummings, though,
she thought he was really
good and she was
right.

I remember when I read Turgenev,
though, I had just come out of the
drunk tank and I was living
alone
and I thought he was really a
subtle and funny son of a
bitch.

Hemingway I read everywhere,
sometimes a few times over
and he made me feel brave
and tough
until one day
it all just stopped cold for me
and worse than that,
Ernie became an
irritant.

My Jeffers period was sometime
in Los Angeles, some room, some
job,
the same woman was back
and she said,
"Jesus, how can you read this
crap?"
one time when she was gone
I found many magazines
under the bed.
I pulled them out
and found that the contents were
all about murder
and it was all about women
who were tortured, killed,
dismembered and so
forth with the
lurid photos
in black and
white.
that stuff wasn't for
me.

my first encounter with Henry
Miller was via paperback
on a bus through Arizona.
he was great when he stuck
to reality
but when he got ethereal
when he got to philosophizing
he got as dry and boring as
the passing
landscape.
I left him in the men's crapper
at a hamburger
stop.

I got hold of Celine's Journey
and read it straight through
while in bed eating crackers.
I kept reading, eating the
crackers and reading, reading,
laughing out loud,
thinking, at last I've met a man
who writes better than
I.
I finished the book and then
drank much water.
the crackers swelled up
inside of me
and I got the worst
god damned stomach
ache of my
life.

I was living with my first
wife.
she worked for the L.A.
Sheriff's Dept.
and she came in to
find me doubled up
and moaning.

"Oh, what happened?"

"I've just read the world's
greatest
writers!"

"But you said you were."

"I'm second, baby . . ."

I read F. D.'s Notes from the
Underground
in a small El Paso
library
after sleeping the night
on a park bench
during a sand
storm.
after reading that book
I knew I had a long way
to go as a
writer.

I don't know where I read
T. S. Eliot.
he made a small dent
which soon ironed
out.

there were many rooms,
many books,
D. H. Lawrence, Gorky,
A. Huxley, Sherwood
Anderson, Sinclair Lewis,
James Thurber, Dos Passos,
etc
Kafka.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Rabelais.
Hamsun.

as a very young man
I worked as a shipping clerk,
made the bars at night,
came into the roominghouse,
went to bed
and read the
books.
 I had 3 or 4 of them in
bed with me (what a
man!) and then I would
sleep.

my landlady finally told
me, "You know, you read those
books in bed and about every
hour or so one of them will
fall to the floor.
You are keeping everybody
awake!"

(I was on the 3rd floor.)

what days and nights those
were.

now I can't read anything,
not even the newspaper.
and, of course, I can't watch
tv except for the boxing
matches.
I do hear some news
on the car radio
while driving the freeway
and waiting for the
traffic
reports.

but you know, by former
life as a bibliophile, it
possibly kept me from
murdering somebody,
myself
included.
it kept me from being an
industrialist.
it allowed me to endure
some women
that most men would never
be able to live
with.
it gave me space, a
pause.
it helped me to write
this.

(in this room,
like the other rooms)

perhaps for some young man
now
needing
to laugh at the
impossibilities
which are here
always
after we are
not.

Charles Bukowski - "So you want to be a writer"

so you want to be a writer

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Bukowski - If you try it...

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

Bukowksi; born into this

Amazing man. No metaphores. No glamour.

Fucked. Tough.

Writing, always writing.

read "average people", or whatever the title is.

Doctor: you take one more drink, you're dead.
Bukowski, years later: Doctors often lie to you.

Points at star in windowshield of his car. Girlfriend's heel did that. She thought we were about to die. We didn't. I like it. I like the design. It starts to look like me.

very intense man, amazingly intense poetry. I can never live the life he had, nor do I think I aspire to do so... but at times... at times...

Charles Bukowski - various poetry

Loved the book of poetry I got from the library. Renewed it at least four times.

It is time to move on, but I will look through his work often. He makes me want to write, he makes me see things in different ways.

Charles Bukowski - "mind and heart"

unaccountably we are alone
forever alone
and it was meant to be
that way,
it was never meant
to be any other way -
and when the death struggle
begins
the last thing I wish to see
is
a ring of human faces
hovering over me -
better just my old friends,
the walls of myself,
let only them be there.

I have been alone but seldom
lonely.
I have satisfied my thirst
at the well
of my self
and that wine was good,
the best I ever had,
and tonight
sitting
staring into the dark
I now finally understand
the dark and the
light and everything
in between.

peace of mind and heart
arrives
when we accept what
is:
having been
born into this
strange life
we must accept
the wasted gamble of our
days
and take some satisfaction in
the pleasure of
leaving it all
behind.

cry not for me.

grieve not for me.

read
what I've written
then forget it
all.

drink from the well
of your self
and begin
again.

Charles Bukowski - "the end of an era" (from: "Come on in!")

...

he had a
real
soul
and the usual
real
needs.

Charles Bukowski - "Come On In! new poems"

These poems are part of an archive of unpublished work that Charles Bukowski left to be published after his death.

Still love his deadpan voice.

Makes me wonder what it is like to write (poetry) on a typewriter.

It makes me starting to see the poetry in spilled salt, in the strong gusts of winds that whip the unfamiliar rain around, in everything.

... that their
morning eagerness
means that
they retired early
and thus wasted the
preceding
night

Charles Bukowski - "16-bit Intel 8088 chip"

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

ain't that the damn truth