The Pleasures of the Damned

Charles Bukowski

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061749520
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Poetry
• Index: Literature

"The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

"He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels."—Leonard Cohen, songwriter

The Pleasures of the Damned features selected later poetry of Charles Bukowski, America's most influential poet.

To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was—and remains—a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he struck a chord with generations of readers, writing raw, tough poetry about booze, work, and women, that spoke to his fans as "real" and, like the work of the Beats, even dangerous.

The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works of Bukowski's later years, edited by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, including the last of his new, never-before-published poems.

the mockingbird

the mockingbird had been following the cat

all summer

mocking mocking mocking

teasing and cocksure;

the cat crawled under rockers on porches

tail flashing

and said something angry to the mockingbird

which I didn’t understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway

with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,

wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,

feathers parted like a woman’s legs,

and the bird was no longer mocking,

it was asking, it was praying

but the cat

striding down through centuries

would not listen.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car

with the bird

to bargain it to another place.

summer was over.

something’s knocking at the door

a great white light dawns across the

continent

as we fawn over our failed traditions,

often kill to preserve them

or sometimes kill just to kill.

it doesn’t seem to matter: the answers dangle just

out of reach,

out of hand, out of mind.

the leaders of the past were insufficient,

the leaders of the present are unprepared.

we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.

it is a waiting without hope, more like

a prayer for unmerited grace.

it all looks more and more like the same old

movie.

the actors are different but the plot’s the same:

senseless.

we should have known, watching our fathers.

we should have known, watching our mothers.

they did not know, they too were not prepared to

teach.

we were too naive to ignore their

counsel

and now we have embraced their

ignorance as our

own.

we are them, multiplied.

we are their unpaid debts.

we are bankrupt

in money and

in spirit.

there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the

edge

and will

at any moment

tumble down to join the rest

of us,

the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly

corrupt.

a great white light dawns across the

continent,

the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,

as grotesque and ultimately

unlivable

our 21st century

struggles to beborn.

his wife, the painter

There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,

and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like

insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,

says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.

“I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are at work.”

He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he

fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like

a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.

He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than

his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he

self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.

Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.) Paris,

Bibliothe`que Nationale.

“She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”

“What is it? A love affair?”

“Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”

I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a

lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,

and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that

clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…

men drive cars and paint their houses,

but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.

Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.

Paris, Louvre

“I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”

“Are you still reading Freud?”

“Page 299.”

She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one

arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the

snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve

time and the dog.

About church: the trouble with a mask is it

never changes.

So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.

So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs

and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the

wind like the end of a tunnel.

He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some

segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.

When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches

warmer and more blood-real than the dove.

Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.

Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.

He burned away in sleep.

on the sidewalk and in the sun

I have seen an old man around town recently

carrying an enormous pack.

he uses a walking stick

and moves up and down the streets

with this pack strapped to his back.

I keep seeing him.

if he’d only throw that pack away, I think,

he’d have a chance, not much of a chance

but a chance.

and he’s in a tough district—east Hollywood.

they aren’t going to give him a

dry bone in east Hollywood.

he is lost. with that pack.

on the sidewalk and in the sun.

god almighty, old man, I think, throw away that

pack.

then I drive on, thinking of my own

problems.

the last time I saw him he was not walking.

it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent,

the pack still strapped to his back.

I slowed down to look at his face.

I had seen one or two other men in my life

with looks on their faces like

that.

I speeded up and turned on the

radio.

I knew that look.

I would never see him again.

the elephants of Vietnam

first they used to, he told me,

gun and bomb the elephants,

you could hear their screams over all the other sounds;

but you flew high to bomb the people,

you never saw it,

just a little flash from way up

but with the elephants

you could watch it happen

and hear how they screamed;

I’d tell my buddies, listen, you guys

stop that,

but they just laughed

as the elephants scattered

throwing up their trunks (if they weren’t blown off )

opening their mouths

wide and

kicking their dumb c...