On Love. Charles Bukowski

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СКАЧАТЬ I know that you are a

      contemporary, a modern living

      work

      perhaps not immortal

      but we have

      loved.

      please continue to

      snore.

a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops

      if love could go on like tarpaper

      or even as far as meaning goes

      but it won’t work

      can’t work

      there are too many snot-heads

      too many women who hide their legs

      except for special bedrooms

      there are too many flies on the

      ceiling and it’s been a hot

      Summer

      and the riots in Los Angeles

      have been over for a week

      and they burned buildings and killed policemen and

      whitemen and

      I am a whiteman and I guess I did not get particularly

      excited because I am a whiteman and I am poor

      and I pay for being poor

      because I do as few handstands for somebody else as

      possible

      and so I’m poor because I choose it and I guess it’s

      not as uncomfortable that

      way

      and so I ignored the riots

      because I figured both the black and the white

      wanted many things that did not interest

      me

      plus having a woman here who gets very excited about

      discrimination the Bomb segregation

      you know you know

      I let her go on until finally the talk

      wearies me

      for I don’t care too much for the

      standard answer

      or the lonely addled creatures who like to join a

      CAUSE simply because a cause lifts them out of their

      dribbling

      imbecility into a stream of

      action. me, I like time to think, think, think . . .

      but it was a party here, really, machineguns, tanks,

      the army fighting against men on rooftops . . .

      the same thing we accused Russia of doing. well, it’s

      a lousy game, and I don’t know what to do, except

      if it’s like a friend of mine said I said one night when

      I was drunk: “Don’t ever kill anybody, even if it seems

      like the last or the only thing to do.”

      laugh. all right. it might make you happy

      that I even have a stream of remorse when I kill a

      fly. an ant. a flea. yet I go on. I kill them and

      go on.

      god, love is more strange than numerals more strange

      than

      grass on fire more strange than the dead body of a child

      drowned in the bottom of a tub, we know so

      little, we know so much, we don’t know

      enough.

      anyhow, we go through our movements, bowel,

      sometimes

      sexual, sometimes heavenly, sometimes bastardly, or

      sometimes we walk through a museum to see what is

      left of us or it, the sad strictured palsy of glassed

      and frozen and sterile madhouse background

      enough to make you want to walk out into the sun again

      and look around, but in the park and on the streets

      the dead keep on moving through as if they were already

      in a museum. maybe love is sex. maybe love is a bowl of

      mush. maybe love is a radio shut off.

      anyway, it was a party.

      a week ago.

      today I went to the track with roses in my eyes. dollars in

      my

      pocket. headlines in the alley. it’s over a hundred miles by

      train,

      one way. a party of drunks coming back, broke again, the

      dream

      shot again, bodies wobbling; yakking in the barcar and I’m

      in there

      too, drinking, scribbling what’s left of hope in the dim light,

      the

      barman was a Negro and I was white. bad fix. we made

      it.

      no party.

      the rich newspapers keep talking about “The Negro

      Revolution” and

      “The Breakdown of the Negro Family.” the train hit town,

      finally,

      and СКАЧАТЬ