Come On In!. Charles Bukowski

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СКАЧАТЬ English accent,

      no remittance checks from aristocratic ladies in Europe

      with blind and impotent

      husbands.

      it’s more like a fast hockey game

      or putting on the gloves with a man

      50 pounds heavier and ten years

      younger, or

      it’s like steering a ship through the fog

      with a mad damsel clinging to your

      neck

      and all along you know you’ve gotten away

      with some quite obvious stuff, that

      you’ve been given undeserved credit, for stuff

      that you either wrote offhand or

      hardly meant or hardly cared

      about.

      well, it helps to be

      lucky.

      yet, on the other hand, you have sometimes

      done it as you always knew it should

      be done, and you knew then that it was

      as good as it could be done,

      and that maybe you had done it better,

      in a way,

      than anybody else had done it for a long time

      and

      you allowed yourself to feel

      good about that

      for a moment or

      two.

      they put the pressure on you

      with statements about 200 years,

      and when only one individual says it, that’s all

      right

      but when 2 or 3 or 4 say it—

      that’s when they tend to open the door to a

      kookoo bin.

      they tell you to give up cigarettes and

      booze, and then they tell you that you

      have 25 more good years ahead of you and

      then

      perhaps ten more years to enjoy your old

      age

      as you suck on

      the rewards and

      memories.

      Patchen’s gone, we need you, man,

      we all need you for that

      good feeling just above the

      belly button—

      knowing that you are there in some small room in

      northern California writing poems and

      killing flies with a torn

      flyswatter.

      they can kill you,

      the praisers can kill you,

      the young girls can kill you,

      as the blue-eyed boys in English depts.

      who send warm letters

      handwritten

      on lined paper

      can kill you,

      and they’re all correct:

      2 packs a day and the bottle

      can kill you

      too.

      of course,

      anything can kill you

      and something eventually

      will. all I can say is that

      today

      I have just inserted a new

      typewriter ribbon

      into this old machine

      and I am pleased with the way it

      works and that makes for more than just an

      ordinary day, thank

      you.

       residue

      there’s an old movie

      based on a Hemingway short story

      I saw the beginning of it

      again on late night /

      early morning tv

      but the fellow who plays

      Hem

      his ears aren’t right

      neither are

      his chin

      his hair

      his voice;

      and there’s this lovely

      wench

      in the film

      with perfect buns

      whose role it is to

      endure his precious

      literary abuse

      while he slowly dies in the

      African jungle.

      I click the movie off.

      of course, I never met

      Hemingway.

      maybe СКАЧАТЬ