Oh Yes

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late.

Charles Bukowski

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Don’t try

In a letter to good friend, fellow poet, and founder of New York Quarterly magazine William Packard in 1990, then-70yr-old Charles Bukowski discusses the art of writing, reiterating his belief that a writer’s words and ideas should come naturally, and not be forced. Four years later, Bukowski passed away. Carved into his headstone are the words, “DON’T TRY”.

We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told.

Girl In A Miniskirt Reading The Bible Outside My Window

Sunday, I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthodox to the
west.

she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rhythmic dance
reading the Bible…

long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long yellow legs warm in the sun…

there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to…

my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rhythms of the
symphony…

she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.
I am God.

Charles Bukowski

"as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you’ve created very
little.

it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.

leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much."

Charles Bukowski, As the Poems Go