Shaving is something like seeing yourself in a movie.īy Cole Schafer (but mostly Charles Bukowski). Her dog’s eyes were more lovely than those of any woman I have ever known.

She smelled of cheery blossoms and French perfume. She had slim ankles, flat brown shoes and eyes like a startled doe. Charles Bukowski the lucky ones stuck in the rain on the freeway, 6:15 p.m., stop, then first gear, then stop, these are the lucky ones, these are the employed, most with their radios on while lighting cigarettes, trying not to think. She had on a see-through blouse with a very brief brassiere. She was standing in front of the Bran Flakes and the Wheaties, skirt about 3 inches above the knee and tight-fitting. They can heal with their touch, they can kill what they touch and I am dying but not dead yet. Upstairs a man pukes his entire stomach into a wastebasket. Wive's heads are battered against kitchen walls by unemployed butchers. I've even lost a sheet of paper I used to keep that told me where I had sent some poems or where some had been accepted, Bukowski explained to Corrington. It’s moving the sun as you put your shoes on for the last time without knowing it.Īnd I hear the sound of high heels biting into the pavement outside.īorn to sever fingers on the edge of tuna cans. The red moon whirls, a mouse runs along the windowsill changing colors, I am alone in torn levis and a white sweatshirt –– she’s with her man now in the shadow of that wall and as he enters her I draw upon my cigarette. Hell crawls through the window without a sound, enters my room, takes off his hat and sits down on the couch across from me. There is loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of a clock’s hand. She’s more dangerous than all the armies of all time. It is hard to find a man whose poems don’t finally disappoint you. My typewriter at this hour would scream like a raped bear. When things get bad enough, the kitten will kill the lion.ĭeath comes slowly like ants to a fallen fig.

I held my head in all its tender precious agony and we drank together. In the sun and in the rain, in the day and in the night, pain is a flower, pain is flowers, blooming all the time.Īll people start to come apart finally and there it is: just empty ashtrays in a room or wisps of hair on a comb in the dissolving moonlight. He could write a fiery sentence, and with using words that a man of little education could recognize –– this, for me, will forever be a sign of literary genius. begins and ends with the single sentence. doesn’t have to be complicated and that it 2). The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski 7,080 ratings, 4.30 average rating, 381 reviews Open Preview The Last Night of the Earth Poems Quotes Showing 1-30 of 77 I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people. I pick up Charles Bukowski anytime I feel like I’m doing too much with my writing: getting overly expressive, reaching for flowery language, etc.īukowski’s writing reminds us that great writing 1).

Bukowski poems