The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills by Charles Bukowski Page B

a
    baked potato, I fire back and sing
    sing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory
    of the coming of the Lord; He is
    tramping out the vintage…”
     

these things
     
     
    these things that we support most well
    have nothing to do with us,
    and we do with them
    out of of boredom or fear or money
    or cracked intelligence;
    our circle and our candle of light
    being small,
    so small we cannot bear it,
    we heave out with Idea
    and lose the Center:
    all wax without the wick,
    and we see names that once meant wisdom,
    like signs into ghost towns,
    and only the graves are real.
     

poem for personnel managers:
     
     
    An old man asked me for a cigarette
    and I carefully dealt out two.
    “Been lookin’ for job. Gonna stand
    in the sun and smoke.”
     
 
    He was close to rags and rage
    and he leaned against death.
    It was a cold day, indeed, and trucks
    loaded and heavy as old whores
    banged and tangled on the streets…
     
 
    We drop like planks from a rotting floor
    as the world strives to unlock the bone
    that weights its brain.
    (God is a lonely place without steak.)
     
 
    We are dying birds
    we are sinking ships—
    the world rocks down against us
    and we
    throw out our arms
    and we
    throw out our legs
    like the death kiss of the centipede:
    but they kindly snap our backs
    and call our poison “politics.”
     
 
    Well, we smoked, he and I—little men
    nibbling fish-head thoughts…
     
 
    All the horses do not come in,
    and as you watch the lights of the jails
    and hospitals wink on and out,
    and men handle flags as carefully as babies,
    remember this:
     
 
    you are a great-gutted instrument of
    heart and belly, carefully planned—
    so if you take a plane for Savannah,
    take the best plane;
    or if you eat chicken on a rock,
    make it a very special animal.
    (You call it a bird; I call birds
    flowers.)
     
 
    And if you decide to kill somebody,
    make it anybody and not somebody:
    some men are made of more special, precious
    parts: do not kill
    if you will
    a president or a King
    or a man
    behind a desk—
    these have heavenly longitudes
    enlightened attitudes.
     
 
    If you decide,
    take us
    who stand and smoke and glower;
    we are rusty with sadness and
    feverish
    with climbing broken ladders.
     
 
    Take us:
    we were never children
    like your children.
    We do not understand love songs
    like your inamorata.
     
 
    Our faces are cracked linoleum,
    cracked through with the heavy, sure
    feet of our masters.
     
 
    We are shot through with carrot tops
    and poppyseed and tilted grammar;
    we waste days like mad blackbirds
    and pray for alcoholic nights.
    Our silk-sick human smiles wrap around
    us like somebody else’s confetti:
    we do not even belong to the Party.
     
 
    We are a scene chalked-out with the
    sick white brush of Age.
     
 
    We smoke, asleep as a dish of figs.
    We smoke, dead as a fog.
     
 
    Take us.
     
 
    A bathtub murder
    or something quick and bright; our names
    in the papers.
     
 
    Known, at last, for a moment
    to millions of careless and grape-dull eyes
    that hold themselves private
    to only flicker and flame
    at the poor cracker-barrel jibes
    of their conceited, pampered correct comedians.
     
 
    Known, at last, for a moment,
    as they will be known
    and as you will be known
    by an all-gray man on an all-gray horse
    who sits and fondles a sword
    longer than the night
    longer than the mountain’s aching backbone
    longer than all the cries
    that have a-bombed up out of throats
    and exploded in a newer, less-planned
    land.
     
 
    We smoke and the clouds do not notice us.
    A cat walks by and shakes Shakespeare off of his back.
    Tallow, tallow, candle like wax: our spines
    are limp and our consciousness burns
    guilelessly away
    the remaining wick life has
    doled out to us.
     
 
    An old man asked me for a cigarette
    and told me his troubles
    and this
    is what he said:
    that Age was a crime
    and that Pity picked up the marbles
    and that Hatred picked up the
    cash.
     
 
    He might have been