Read Online The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski - Free Book Online Page A

great
    force.
 
    when you fought
    “Downtown” Billy
    you never knew
    where the punches
    were coming
    from: “They come
    from Downtown…”
 
    “Downtown” once rose
    all the way
    to #4 in his weight
    class,
    then he dropped out
    of the first
    ten.
 
    then he fell to
    fighting 6 rounders,
    then 4.
 
    the punches still
    came from
    Downtown
    but you could
    see them
    coming.
    then he was just a
    sparring
    partner.
 
    last I heard
    he left
    town.
 
    today I feel
    like “Downtown” Billy,
    sitting in this
    blue garden chair
    under the
    walnut
    tree,
    watching the
    neighbor boy
    bounce a
    basketball,
    take some
    fancy steps
    forward,
    then loop the
    ball
    through the
    hoop
    over the
    garage
    door.
 
    I have just taken
    my
    pills.

8 count
     
     
    from my bed
    I watch
    3 birds
    on a telephone
    wire.
 
    one flies
    off.
    then
    another.
 
    one is left,
    then
    it too
    is gone.
 
    my typewriter is
    tombstone
    still.
 
    and I am
    reduced to bird
    watching.
 
    just thought I’d
    let you
    know,
    fucker.

ill
     
     
    being very ill and very weak is a very strange
    thing.
    when it takes all your strength to get from the
    bedroom to the bathroom and back, it seems like
    a joke but
    you don’t laugh.
 
    back in bed you consider death again and find
    the same thing: the closer you get to it
    the less forbidding it
    becomes.
 
    you have much time to examine the walls
    and outside
    birds on a telephone wire take on much
    importance.
    and there’s the tv: men playing baseball
    day after day.
 
    no appetite.
    food tastes like cardboard, it makes you
    ill, more than
    ill.
 
    the good wife keeps insisting that you
    eat.
    “the doctor said…”
 
    poor dear.
 
    and the cats.
    the cats jump up on the bed and look at me.
    they stare, then jump
    off.
 
    what a world, you think: eat, work, fuck,
    die.
    luckily I have a contagious disease: no
    visitors.
 
    the scale reads 155, down from
    217.
 
    I look like a man in a death camp.
    I
    am.
 
    still, I’m lucky: I feast on solitude, I
    will never miss the crowd.
 
    I could read the great books but the great books don’t
    interest me.
 
    I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go
    one way or the
    other.
 
    just like everybody
    else.

only one Cervantes
     
     
    it’s no use, I’ve got to admit,
    I am into my first real
    writer’s block
    after over
    5 decades
    of typing.
    I have some excuses:
    I’ve had a long
    illness
    and I’m nearing the age of
    70.
    and when you’re near
    70 you always consider the
    possibility of
    slippage.
    but I am bucked-up
    by the fact that
    Cervantes
    wrote his greatest work
    at the age of
    80.
    but how many
    Cervantes
    are there?
 
    I’ve been spoiled with the
    easy way I have created
    things,
    and now there’s this
    miserable
    stoppage.
 
    and now
    spiritually constipated I’ve
    grown testy,
    have screamed at my wife
    twice this week,
    once smashing a glass
    into the sink.
    bad form,
    sick nerves,
    bad
    style.
 
    I should accept this
    writer’s block.
    hell, I’m lucky I’m alive,
    I’m lucky I don’t have
    cancer.
    I’m lucky in a hundred
    different ways.
    sometimes at night
    in bed
    at one or two a.m.
    I will think about
    how lucky I am
    and it keeps me
    awake.
 
    now I’ve always written in a
    selfish way, that is, to please
    myself.
    by writing things down I have
    been better able to
    live with them.
 
    now, that’s
    stopped.
 
    I see other old men with canes
    sitting at bus stop benches,
    staring straight into the sun and
    seeing nothing.
    and I know there are other
    old men
    in hospitals and nursing
    homes
    sitting upright in their
    beds
    grunting over
    bedpans.
    death is nothing, brother,
    it’s life that’s
    hard.
 
    writing has been my fountain
    of youth,
    my whore,
    my love,
    my gamble.
 
    the gods have spoiled me.
 
    yet look, I am still
    lucky,
    for writing about a
    writer’s block
    is better than not writing
    at all.

that I have known the dead
     
     
    that I have known the dead and now