Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

[angeldust]

My Father

was a truly amazing man
he pretended to be
rich
even though we lived on beans and mush and weenies
when we sat down to eat, he said,
"not everybody can eat like this."

and because he wanted to be rich or because he actually
thought he was rich
he always voted Republican
and he voted for Hoover against Roosevelt
and he lost
and then he voted for Alf Landon against Roosevelt
and he lost again
saying, "I don't know what this world is coming to,
now we've got that god damned Red in there again
and the Russians will be in our backyard next!"

I think it was my father who made me decide to
become a bum.
I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich
then I want to be poor.

and I became a bum.
I lived on nickles and dimes and in cheap rooms and
on park benches.
I thought maybe the bums knew something.

but I found out that most of the bums wanted to be
rich too.
they had just failed at that.

so caught between my father and the bums
I had no place to go
and I went there fast and slow.
never voted Republican
never voted.

buried him
like an oddity of the earth
like a hundred thousand oddities
like millions of other oddities,
wasted.



(dha saga vazhdon e njejte dhe sot e kesaj dite)

[angeldust]

SHE SAID
from: War All the Time

what are you doing with all those paper
napkins in your car?
we dont have napkins like
that
how come your car radio is
always turned to some
rock and roll station?do you drive around with
some
young thing?

you're
dripping tangerine
juice on the floor.
whenever you go into
the kitchen
this towel gets
wet and dirty,
why is that?

when you let my
bathwater run
you never
clean the
tub first.

why don't you
put your toothbrush
back
in the rack?

you should always
dry your razor

sometimes
I think
you hate
my cat.

Martha says
you were
downstairs
sitting with her
and you
had your
pants off.

you shouldn't wear
those
$100 shoes in
the garden

and you don't keep
track
of what you
plant out there

that's
dumb

you must always
set the cat's bowl back
in
the same place.

don't
bake fish
in a frying
pan...

I never saw
anybody
harder on the
brakes of their
car
than you.

let's go
to a
movie.

listen what's
wrong with you?
you act
depressed.

[angeldust]

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 Andernach, Germany to an American soilder father and a German mother in 1920, 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 at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California on Mach 9. 1994 at the age of seventy three, shortly after completeing his last novel, Pulp (1994) During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office (1971) Factodum (1975) Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), and Hollywood (1989). His most recent books are the posthumouseditions of Bone Pallace ballet: New poems (1997) ; the Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship (1998) which is illustrated by Robert Crumb; reach For The Sun:Selected Letters 1978-1994 (1999); and What Matters Most Is How Well you Walk through The Fire (1999). All of his books have been published in translations\ in over a dozen languages and his worldwide popularity remains undiminished. In the years to come Black Sparrow Press will publish additional volumes of previously uncollected poetry.
-Black Sparrow Press Bio



Taken from the liner notes of the "Hostage" Spoken Word CD:
If You've got your hand on this album, you undoubtedly know something about Charles Bukowski. Most likely to do with drinking, fornicating, or gambling. Mabye all three. Mabye you heard how he inhabited Skid Row bars and tenement flophouses, for years "vomiting into plugged toilets/in rented rooms full of roaches and mice." Or how he once worked in a dog buscuit factory or that his hobby is horses. Mabye you heard about his disorderly poetry readings on college campuses around the country during the 1970's, "a man of obscene personal habits, a viscious drunk who vomited and urinated over professors' wives and tried to goose them with a calloused index finger." Mabye you heard he worked at the post office. Rumor has been good to old Hank. But Whatever you've heard or have not heard, whatever Bukowski is, was, or might have done, the man remains first and foremost a writer. And he comes away from his desk only for a price. For you, that means the "price" of this album. For others, it meant the price of a poetry reading. For that price, Bukowski is held hostage. A low-life drifter whose face is to ugliness and abuse what Paul Bunyan's body was to size and strength, German-born Bukowski didn't even start writing poetry until he was 35, when a 10-year-long party with alchohol and pills concluded with severe eternal hemorrhaging at the Los Angeles County Hospital Charity Ward. Surviving his brush with death, Bukowski made the dirty beds and sleazy bars, Los Angeles' urban ditch, into landscapes, for free-verse stories and poems. He deluged literary magazine editors with his work. He began collecting innumerable disciples. During the mid-'60's, Bukowski had a column called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" in various underground newspapers. He distrupted any party he was invited to and many he wasn't. In Los Angeles especially, his poetry readings became parties themselves, with "poet and audience both drunk." As you'll hear on this album, fans and poet come to these readings prepared to compete. "Is there anybody tough enough here to try me?" Bukowski taunts the crowd. "try some shit, do some anger." As long as his influence seemed centered in L.A., Bukowski was easy to dismiss as nothing more than a flamboyant provincial, a throwback to a simpler, mortgage-free way of life, a poet firmly in the tradition of California low-brow. But Bukowski's adherants have grown beyond the city, beyond the state. Indeed Charles Bukowski is now one of the most influential poets writing in America- the other being his diametrical opposite, the abstract expressionist John Ashbury. And between you and me, in pure numbers, Bukowski has been winning this race "going away". Imitators across the country adapt his attitudes, aethetics, and techniques now. Urban wastelands of wasted individuals are seen through the sentimental eyes of sympathetic, half-cultured thoughts- Philip Marlowes, Humphrey Bogarts, Hank Chinaskis- who maintain their heroic integrity and chivalric humanity in a mean, stinking world. Bukowski has become the prophet of the underemployed, those students of the 70's who didn't take MBA's but became the educated factory workers and tecnicians of the 80's. The security guard who works out chess problems in his spare time, the computer programmer who can whistle Beethoven, the assembly-line worker who reads poetry nightly- all are fans who adapt Bukowski's prose of low-brow sophistication as one defense against the meaninglessness of mindless labor. Hank Chinaski, Bukowski's character in the poems and prose, is also an influence. He's a Philip Marlowe type who is perfectly capable of beating up three men and cradling a stray dog the same night. Like Chandler's famous detective, Bukowski's hard-boiled anti-hero paradoxically mixes cynicism and honor, brutality and pathos, failure and sucess. But mabye Charles Bukowski knows his real achievements best: "My contribution", he wrote in 1974, "was to loosen and simplify poetry, to make it more human... I taught them that you can write a poem the same way you can write a letter, that a poem can even be entertaining, and that there need not be anything necessarily holy about it."

http://www.solidsender.com/dstrbo/news/bukowski.gif

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

angel, paske filluar te lexosh poete te degjenerum eh? nuku mire nuku mire :)

The Blackbirds are Rough Today

lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.

shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.

taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.

a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.

the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail---
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.

and everywhere is
nowhere---
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:

why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school---
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.

we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.

don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.

[Leila]

Ku e keni ate "to the whore who took my poems?"

[angeldust]

Leila sille, c'pret.


Njerezit e shkrete... :(

hell is a lonely place
he was 65, his wife was 66, had
Alzheimer's disease.

he had cancer of the
mouth.
there were
operations, radiation
treatments
which decayed the bones in his
jaw
which then had to be
wired.

daily he put his wife in
rubber diapers
like a
baby.

unable to drive in his
condition
he had to take a taxi to
the medical
center,
had difficulty speaking,
had to
write the directions
down.

on his last visit
they informed him
there would be another
operation: a bit more
left
cheek and a bit more
tounge.

when he returned
he changed his wife's
diapers
put on the tv
dinners, watched the
evening news
then went to the bedroom, got the
gun, put it to her
temple, fired.

she fell to the
left, he sat upon the
couch
put the gun into his
mouth, pulled the
trigger.

the shots didn't arouse
the neighbors.

later
the burning tv dinners
did.

somebody arrived, pushed
the door open, saw
it.

soon
the police arrived and
went through their
routine, found
some items:

a closed savings
account and
a checkbook with a
balance of
$1.14
suicide, they
deduced.

in three weeks
there were two
new tenants:
a computer engineer
named
Ross
and his wife
Anatana
who studied
ballet.

they looked like another
upwardly mobile
pair.

[angeldust]

we ain't got no money,honey, but we got rain

call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn't rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the
depression era.
there wasn't any money but there was
plenty of rain.
it wouldn't rain for just a night or
a day,
it would RAIN for 7 days and 7
nights
and in Los Angeles the storm drains
weren't built to carry off that much
water
and the rain came down THICK and
MEAN and
STEADY
and you HEARD it banging against
the roofs and into the ground
waterfalls of it came down
from roofs
and there was HAIL
big ROCKS OF ICE
bombing
exploding smashing into things
and the rain
just wouldn't
STOP
and all the roofs leaked-
dishpans,
cooking pots
were placed all about;
they dripped loudly
and had to be emptied
again and
again.
the rain came up over the street curbings,
across the lawns, climbed up the steps and
entered the houses.
there were mops and bathroom towels,
and the rain often came up through the
toilets:bubbling, brown, crazy,whirling,
and all the old cars stood in the streets,
cars that had problems starting on a
sunny day,
and the jobless men stood
looking out the windows
at the old machines dying
like living things out there.
the jobless men,
failures in a failing time
were imprisoned in their houses with their
wives and children
and their
pets.
the pets refused to go out
and left their waste in
strange places.
the jobless men went mad
confined with
their once beautiful wives.
there were terrible arguments
as notices of foreclosure
fell into the mailbox.
rain and hail, cans of beans,
bread without butter;fried
eggs, boiled eggs, poached
eggs; peanut butter
sandwiches, and an invisible
chicken in every pot.
my father, never a good man
at best, beat my mother
when it rained
as I threw myself
between them,
the legs, the knees, the
screams
until they
seperated.
"I'll kill you," I screamed
at him. "You hit her again
and I'll kill you!"
"Get that son-of-a-bitching
kid out of here!"
"no, Henry, you stay with
your mother!"
all the households were under
seige but I believe that ours
held more terror than the
average.
and at night
as we attempted to sleep
the rains still came down
and it was in bed
in the dark
watching the moon against
the scarred window
so bravely
holding out
most of the rain,
I thought of Noah and the
Ark
and I thought, it has come
again.
we all thought
that.
and then, at once, it would
stop.
and it always seemed to
stop
around 5 or 6 a.m.,
peaceful then,
but not an exact silence
because things continued to
drip
drip
drip
and there was no smog then
and by 8 a.m.
there was a
blazing yellow sunlight,
Van Gogh yellow-
crazy, blinding!
and then
the roof drains
relieved of the rush of
water
began to expand in the warmth:
PANG!PANG!PANG!
and everybody got up and looked outside
and there were all the lawns
still soaked
greener than green will ever
be
and there were birds
on the lawn
CHIRPING like mad,
they hadn't eaten decently
for 7 days and 7 nights
and they were weary of
berries
and
they waited as the worms
rose to the top,
half drowned worms.
the birds plucked them
up
and gobbled them
down;there were
blackbirds and sparrows.
the blackbirds tried to
drive the sparrows off
but the sparrows,
maddened with hunger,
smaller and quicker,
got their
due.
the men stood on their porches
smoking cigarettes,
now knowing
they'd have to go out
there
to look for that job
that probably wasn't
there, to start that car
that probably wouldn't
start.
and the once beautiful
wives
stood in their bathrooms
combing their hair,
applying makeup,
trying to put their world back
together again,
trying to forget that
awful sadness that
gripped them,
wondering what they could
fix for
breakfast.
and on the radio
we were told that
school was now
open.
and
soon
there I was
on the way to school,
massive puddles in the
street,
the sun like a new
world,
my parents back in that
house,
I arrived at my classroom
on time.
Mrs. Sorenson greeted us
with, "we won't have our
usual recess, the grounds
are too wet."
"AW!" most of the boys
went.
"but we are going to do
something special at
recess," she went on,
"and it will be
fun!"
well, we all wondered
what that would
be
and the two hour wait
seemed a long time
as Mrs.Sorenson
went about
teaching her
lessons.
I looked at the little
girls, they looked so
pretty and clean and
alert,
they sat still and
straight
and their hair was
beautiful
in the California
sunshine.
the the recess bells rang
and we all waited for the
fun.
then Mrs. Sorenson told us:
"now, what we are going to
do is we are going to tell
each other what we did
during the rainstorm!
we'll begin in the front row
and go right around!
now, Michael, you're first!. . ."
well, we all began to tell
our stories, Michael began
and it went on and on,
and soon we realized that
we were all lying, not
exactly lying but mostly
lying and some of the boys
began to snicker and some
of the girls began to give
them dirty looks and
Mrs.Sorenson said,
"all right! I demand a
modicum of silence
here!
I am interested in what
you did
during the rainstorm
even if you
aren't!"
so we had to tell our
stories and they were
stories.
one girl said that
when the rainbow first
came
she saw God's face
at the end of it.
only she didn't say which end.
one boy said he stuck
his fishing pole
out the window
and caught a little
fish
and fed it to his
cat.
almost everybody told
a lie.
the truth was just
too awful and
embarassing to tell.
then the bell rang
and recess was
over.
"thank you," said Mrs.
Sorenson, "that was very
nice.
and tomorrow the grounds
will be dry
and we will put them
to use
again."
most of the boys
cheered
and the little girls
sat very straight and
still,
looking so pretty and
clean and
alert,
their hair beautiful in a sunshine that
the world might never see
again.

[Leila]

Me pertace se une keni qene! :D Kane ca Charles Bukowski CDs, poetry readings, keshtu qe mund ta gjeni neper programet qe perdorni per te download kenge falas. ;)

To The Whore Who Took My Poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

Ndersa une dua ate ku Buu-ja eshte ne dashuri me gruan e vet :D Please!

Kjo me poshte me pelqen:

Alone with Everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.