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Bukowski Poems American Literature 2: Throwing Away The Alarm Clock
Bukowski Poems American Literature 2: Throwing Away The Alarm Clock
Bukowski Poems American Literature 2: Throwing Away The Alarm Clock
American Literature 2
More at http://www.poemhunter.com/charles-bukowski/poems/
never
knew.
gas
my grandmother had a serious gas
problem.
we only saw her on Sunday.
she'd sit down to dinner
and she'd have gas.
she was very heavy,
80 years old.
wore this large glass brooch,
that's what you noticed most
in addition to the gas.
she'd let it go just as food was being served.
she'd let it go in bursts
spaced about a minute apart.
she'd let it go
4 or 5 times
as we reached for the potatoes
poured the gravy
cut into the meat.
nobody ever said anything,
especially me.
I was 6 years old.
only my grandmother spoke.
after 4 or 5 blasts
she would say in an offhand way,
"I'll bury you all!"
I didn't much like that:
first farting
then saying that.
it happened every Sunday.
she was my father's mother.
every Sunday it was death and gas
and mashed potatoes and gravy
and that big glass brooch.
those Sunday dinners would
always end with apple pie and
ice cream
and a big argument
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much.
here's a drink
to your bones
that
this dog
still
dreams about.
no wonder
Tony phoned and told me that
Jan had left him but that he was all right;
it helped him he said to think about other great men
like D. H. Lawrence
pissed off with life in general but still
milking his cow;
or to think about
T. Dreiser with his masses of copious
notes
painfully constructing his novels which then made
the very walls applaud;
or I think about van Gogh, Tony continued, a madman
who continued to make great paintings as the
village children threw rocks at his
window;
or, there was Harry Crosby and his mistress
in that fancy hotel room, dying together, swallowed by
the Black sun;
or, take Tchaikovsky, that homo, marrying a
female opera singer and then standing in a freezing
river hoping to catch pneumonia while she went mad;
or Dos Passos, after all those left-wing books,
putting on a suit and a necktie and voting Republican;
or that homo Lorca, shot dead in the road, supposedly
for his politics but really because the mayor of that
town thought his wife had the hots for the poet;
or that other homo Crane, jumping over the rail of the boat
and into the propellor because while drunk he had
promised to marry some woman;
or Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with
Christ on his mind;
or Hemingway, getting his ass kicked by Callaghan
(but Hem was correct in maintaining that F.
bluebird
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?