she's young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
I thought it was all working,
and now it's her again,
every time she phones you go crazy,
you told me it was over
you told me it was finished,
listen, I've lived long enough to become a
good woman,
why do you need a bad woman?
you need to be tortured, don't you?
you think life is rotten if somebody treats you
rotten it all fits,
doesn't it?
tell me, is that it? do you want to be treated like a
piece of shit?
and my son, my son was going to meet you.
I told my son
and I dropped all my lovers.
I stood up in a cafe and screamed
I'M IN LOVE,
and now you've made a fool of me. . .
I'm sorry, I said, I'm really sorry.
hold me, she said, will you please hold me?
I've never been in one of these things before, I said,
these triangles. . .
she got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all
over.she paced up and down,wild and crazy.she had
a small body.her arms were thin,very thin and when
she screamed and started beating me I held her
wrists and then I got it through the eyes:hatred,
centuries deep and true.I was wrong and graceless and
sick.all the things I had learned had been wasted.
there was no creature living as foul as I
and all my poems were
false.
6 comments:
Don't try out loud...
...just keep it inside
Cheers of a clown...when there's no one around.
"Don't Try" is Bukowski's epitaph.
Too much cheer from a clown and my brain shrinks. Thanks for the clue
“Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb.”
“sometimes I feel like my skivvies are down around my ankles and my butt is a target for hyena turds”
Opposite the damp climbing snake problem.
Buke didn't exactly have the pick of the sane or the beautiful, but you'd think he'd have had the sense to run from a woman who screamed I AM LOVED or I FOUND LOVE or whatever in a cafe. I mean he was closing in on fifty when this happened. Just because you're a poet doesn't mean you have to abandon common sense. Why, look at me! I'm smaht, can't nobody say I ain't smaht! But I still can't do programs.
Hey, I read something genuinely insightful today about self-pity. The person who, even privately, curses out other people ala "They can all go screw themselves!" That too is a form of self-pity, in that it gives that person the excuse not to do anything about his situation because "People are no damn good" and therefore there's nothing to be done. It cements his victim status. So even if you come off as non-self pitying in public, if you go home and lick your wounds you're basically as guilty of self-pity as the overt whiner. Yes, it hurt to read that, but it's the troof and will have to be swallowed...by me. Not by you perfects ha ha ha.
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