The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills by Charles Bukowski Page A
Authors: Charles Bukowski
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screaming
as the room became red
GOD O GOD!
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
and he sat there holding 3 towels
between his legs
not caring now whether she left or
stayed
wore yellow or green or
anything at all.
and one hand holding and one hand
lifting he poured
another wine.
as the sparrow
To give life you must take life,
and as our grief falls flat and hollow
upon the billion-blooded sea
I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed
with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures
lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.
Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow
did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be
young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.
I hated you when it would have taken less courage
to love.
his wife, the painter
There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.
“I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are
at work.”
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he
fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like
a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.
He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than
his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he
self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his
hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.
Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.)
Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.
“She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”
“What is it? A love affair?”
“Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”
I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a
lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,
and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that
clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…
men drive cars and paint their houses,
but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.
Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.
Paris, Louvre.
“I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”
“Are you still reading Freud?”
“Page 299.”
She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one
arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the
snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve
time and the dog.
About church: the trouble with a mask is it
never changes.
So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.
So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs
and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the
wind like the end of a tunnel.
He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some
segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.
When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches
warmer and more blood-real than the dove.
Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.
Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.
He burned away in sleep.
down thru the marching
they came down thru the marching,
down thru St. Paul, St. Louis, Atlanta,
Memphis, New Orleans, they came
down thru the marching, thru
balloons and popcorn, past drugstores
and blondes and whirling cats,
they came down thru the marching
scaring the goats and the kids in
the fields, banging against the minds
of the sick in their hot beds, and
down in the cellar I got out the
colt. I ripped a hole in the screen
for better vision and when the legs
came walking by on top of my head,
I got a colonel, a major and 3 lieutenants
before the band stopped playing;
and now it’s like a war, uniforms
everywhere, behind cars and brush,
and plang plang plang
my cellar is all fireworks, and I
fire back, the colt as hot as
as the room became red
GOD O GOD!
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
and he sat there holding 3 towels
between his legs
not caring now whether she left or
stayed
wore yellow or green or
anything at all.
and one hand holding and one hand
lifting he poured
another wine.
as the sparrow
To give life you must take life,
and as our grief falls flat and hollow
upon the billion-blooded sea
I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed
with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures
lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.
Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow
did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be
young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.
I hated you when it would have taken less courage
to love.
his wife, the painter
There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.
“I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are
at work.”
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he
fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like
a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.
He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than
his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he
self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his
hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.
Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.)
Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.
“She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”
“What is it? A love affair?”
“Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”
I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a
lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,
and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that
clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…
men drive cars and paint their houses,
but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.
Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.
Paris, Louvre.
“I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”
“Are you still reading Freud?”
“Page 299.”
She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one
arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the
snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve
time and the dog.
About church: the trouble with a mask is it
never changes.
So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.
So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs
and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the
wind like the end of a tunnel.
He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some
segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.
When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches
warmer and more blood-real than the dove.
Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.
Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.
He burned away in sleep.
down thru the marching
they came down thru the marching,
down thru St. Paul, St. Louis, Atlanta,
Memphis, New Orleans, they came
down thru the marching, thru
balloons and popcorn, past drugstores
and blondes and whirling cats,
they came down thru the marching
scaring the goats and the kids in
the fields, banging against the minds
of the sick in their hot beds, and
down in the cellar I got out the
colt. I ripped a hole in the screen
for better vision and when the legs
came walking by on top of my head,
I got a colonel, a major and 3 lieutenants
before the band stopped playing;
and now it’s like a war, uniforms
everywhere, behind cars and brush,
and plang plang plang
my cellar is all fireworks, and I
fire back, the colt as hot as
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