ah, Merryman,

a fighter on the docks,

killed a man while they were unloading

bananas.

I mean the man he killed

clubbed him first

from behind

with an anchor chain

(something about a woman)

and we all circled around

while

Merryman

did him in

under a hard-on sun,

finally strangling him to death

throwing him into the

ocean.

Merryman leaped to the dock

and walked

away, nobody tried to stop

him.

then we went back to work and

unloaded the rest of the bananas.

nothing was ever said about the murder

between any of us

and I never saw anthing about it

in the papers.

although I saw some of the bananas

later in the

markets:

2 lbs. for a quarter

they seemed a

bargain.

the pleasures of the damned

are limited to brief moments

of happiness:

like the eyes in the look of a dog,

like a square of wax,

like a fire taking the city hall,

the county,

the continent,

like fire taking the hair

of maidens and monsters;

and hawks buzzing in peach trees,

the sea running between their claws,

Time

drunk and damp,

everything burning,

everything wet,

everything fine.

sitting in a dark bedroom with 3 junkies,

female.

brown paper bags filled with trash are

everywhere.

it is one-thirty in the afternoon.

they talk about madhouses,

hospitals.

they are waiting for a fix.

none of them work.

it’s relief and food-stamps and

Medi-Cal.

men are usable objects

toward the fix.

it is one-thirty in the afternoon

and outside small plants grow.

their children are still in school.

the females smoke cigarettes

and suck listlessly on beer and

tequila

which I have purchased.

I sit with them.

I wait on my fix:

I am a poetry junkie.

they pulled Ezra through the streets

in a wooden cage.

Blake was sure of God.

Villon was a mugger.

Lorca sucked cock.

TS Eliot worked a teller’s cage.

most poets are swans,

egrets.

I sit with 3 junkies

at one-thirty in the afternoon.

the smoke pisses upward.

I wait.

death is a nothing jumbo.

one of the females says that she likes

my yellow shirt.

I believe in a simple violence.

this is

some of it.

—————————————

A new collection of Bukowski’s poems, The Pleasures of the Damned, was published on 14^th January, along with the re-publication of Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes, both from Canongate.

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Germany and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry when he was thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, at the age of seventy-three.

you

no faces

no faces

at all

laughing at nothing—

let me tell you

I have drunk in skid row rooms with

imbecile winos

whose cause was better

whose eyes still held some light

whose voices retained some sensibility,

and when the morning came

we were sick but not ill,

poor but not deluded,

and we stretched in our beds and rose

in the late afternoons

like millionaires.

—————————————

A new collection of Bukowski’s poems, The Pleasures of the Damned, was published on 14^th January, along with the re-publication of Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes, both from Canongate.

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Germany and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry when he was thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, at the age of seventy-three.