The People Look Like Flowers At Last

Charles Bukowski

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061749247
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry

"if you read this after I am dead

It means I made it"

-"The Creation Coffin"

The People Look like Flowers at Last is the last of five collections of never-before published poetry from the late great Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski.

In it, he speaks on topics ranging from horse racing to military elephants, lost love to the fear of death. He writes extensively about writing, and about talking to people about writers such as Camus, Hemingway, and Stein. He writes about war and fatherhood and cats and women.

Free from the pressure to present a consistent persona, these poems present less of an aggressively disruptive character, and more a world-weary and empathetic person.

three

while most people
converse it all away
I
write it down.

poem for my daughter

I spoon it

in: strained chicken noodle dinner

junior prunes

junior fruit dessert.

spoon it in and

for Christ’s sake

don’t blame the

child

don’t blame the

govt.

don’t blame the bosses or the

working classes—

spoon it down

into that little mouth

like melted

wax.

a friend phones:

“whatya gonna do now, Hank?”

“what the hell ya mean, what am I gonna

do?”

“I mean ya got responsibility now, ya gotta bring the

kid up

right.”

I feed her instead:

spoon it in!

may she achieve

a place in Beverly Hills

with never any need for unemployment compensation

and never have to sell to the highest

bidder.

and never fall in love with a soldier or a killer of any

kind.

and may she

appreciate Beethoven and Jelly Roll Morton and

beautiful dresses.

she’s got a real

chance:

there was once the

Theoric Fund and now there’s the

Great Society.

“are ya still gonna play the horses? are ya still gonna

drink? are ya still gonna—?”

“yes.”

she is a waving flower in the wind and the dead center of

my heart—

now she sleeps beautifully like a

boat on the Nile.

maybe some day she will

bury me.

that would be nice

if it weren’t a

responsibility.

sheets

those sheets you’ve got there,

said the old dame

in the housewares dept.,

are for a double bed.

do you have a double bed or a

single bed?

well, you see, I answered,

my bed is an unusual bed, it’s

kind of a single-and-a-

half.

describe your bed, she said.

what?

describe your

bed.

I’d rather not, I said.

well, said the old dame, I want you to

know the sheets you’ve got there are

for a double bed, and if you’ve got a single

bed, it’s against the state

law.

what? I asked. say that

again.

I said, it’s against the state

law.

you mean? I asked.

I mean, you can’t bring these sheets back

after you’ve opened the

package.

all right, I said, give me a couple of

singles.

she treated me then with comfortable

disdain. I believe the old dame had been in

sheets all her

life. I think they should put young girls

in the sheets dept.

after all, sheets don’t make me think of sleep

at all

but something else

entirely. especially crisp white new

sheets.

they ought to put old dames like her in

dog food. or garden supplies. and

when she gave me the singles I knew she knew I slept

alone. like she

did.

sick leave

there I am flat on my belly, Hem is dead, Shake is dead,

the fish I have caught and eaten and shitted are dead

and the doc is ramming a glass tube up my ass,

a glass tube with a little light on the end of it,

and I am hoping for a medical excuse

for 2 more days of sick leave

and the doc plays right along: “ya got some beauts there,

you oughta be cut…” well, the White Russians used to

cut a hole in a man and take hold of the end of the intestine

and nail it to a tree and then force the man to

run around and around the tree.

he pulls the glass tube out of my ass

and part of me along with it

he has a face like a walnut and when his nurse

bends over (which is often)

her butt is like a big soft pillow or

powdered doughnut, no blood, just clouds,

and I say, “Doc, add a day to the excuse,

I can feel the pain all the way down to my nuts…”

“sure,” he says, “sure, I know a lot of boys

from the Post Office, all nice boys.”

at home I screw the cap off the bottle

and have the first good one; it rained while he rammed me:

the rain sits glittering in the screen

like sugar flies eating dreams,

and I split the Racing Form with my thumb,

then call my bookie,

“…give me 2 across on Indian Blood,

5 win on Lady Fanfare, 5 place on The Rage.”

I hang up and think softly of Kafka

sleeping under the paws of gophers

as the lady across the hall sings to her canary.

love has clicked off and on

like a cigarette lighter

and now her love is a

bird.

it gets like that when not much happens

and you play on a small stage,

and I pin my medical exemption to

the front of one of my old paintings

rub some salve up my ass

and pour another drink.

my father

my father liked rules and doing things

the hard way.

he spoke of responsibilities and laws

and things that just had to be done correctly.

a man must work, a man must eat.

a man must own property and mow his lawn.

I turned out to be a drunkard and wanderer

and his hard-packed letters followed me everywhere.

I watched the pigeons in the rain in

New Orleans while his letters said,

get going, make something of yourself!

how hard the world tries and how ha...