my humbler pie

(Source: henrycharlesbukowski)

(Source: narcotic)

“Everything” by Charles Bukowski from The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966.

My favorite Bukowski poem thus far, exploring the meaning of life in light of death. The realization of the exhilaration/power and yet the futility/sadness in wanting it all.

Bukowski’s “It’s Nothing to Laugh About”

there’s no color like the color of an orange,
and the mountains were a sad smokey purple like
old curtains in some cheap burlesque house;

and the small toad sat there
holding the dusky road like a tiny tank,
and staring,
staring like something really definite,
a greener living green than any green leaf;
and it puffed its sides and let them fall
and sometimes through the skin you could see
the dark water of another world;
and then it shot the blood through one eye -
you could see the guts contract
gripped by the glove of the skin-and
the red-thin stream of frogblood
a bright neat trick of centuries
hurled through the bright valley air
upon golden nylon;

she screamed and he laughed, delighted with
the frog’s great victory; she rubbed a quick
pink hanky against the desecrated nylon- 
some womanly female her had been splashed
and unveiled and defeated, and her dress hung
like some loose and second skin as the
indelicate horror writhed in her and claimed away
her fullness;
“you fool!” she spit over the stocking, “it’s
nothing to laugh about!”

he looked at the toad in the fine rustbrown road
and imagined it smiled at him-
and then it turned half-sideways and hopped left
without haste
and popped again into the air
like some slow-motion nature film,
the leg-ends seeming to grip for notches in the air
and the head humped stiff
and brutalized away from life
like an old man reading a newspaper;
and then, with a backward over-the-shoulder look
it hopped into the grass of home;

“he’s gone,”  he spoke sadly. 
he looked to the rocks of the purple mountains
and sensed the frog moving towards them,
done with cities and roads;
he imagined the frog in a stream
his green skin happy against the blue-chill water;

he took her hand and they moved forward
together
over the unguarded road. 

-Charles Bukowski from The Roominghouse Madrigals 

i’d rather be reading bukowski

here presented (for your edification dear readers) is “the loser” by charles bukowski.  

The Loser

and the next I remembered I’m on a table, 
everybody’s gone: the head of bravery
under light, scowling, flailing me down …
and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar;
“Kid you’re no fighter,” he told me,
and I got up and knocked him over a chair;
it was like a scene in a movie, and
he stayed there on his big rump and said
over and over: “Jesus, Jesus, whatsamatta wit
you?” and I got up and dressed,
the tape still on my hands, and when I got home
wrote my first poem,
and I’ve been fighting
ever since.