The Pleasures of the Damned. Charles Bukowski

writer’s funeral the wine of forever the pile-up close encounters of another kind drying out scene from 1940: the area of pause I know you relentless as the tarantula the replacements to lean back into it eating my senior citizen’s dinner at the Sizzler it’s strange The Beast woman on the street lost in San Pedro Manx the history of a tough motherfucker bad fix one for the old boy my cats Death Wants More Death the lisp on being 20 meanwhile the world’s greatest loser the trash men a gold pocket watch talking to my mailbox … I liked him one for the shoeshine man the proud thin dying shot of red-eye about pain hot who in the hell is Tom Jones? the price I’m in love the girls the ladies of summer tonight shoes hug the dark face of a political candidate on a street billboard white dog on going out to get the mail spring swan how is your heart? closing time racetrack parking lot at the end of the day there Dinosauria, we mind and heart TB the orderly the nurses cancer tired in the afterdusk again so now? blue sun coming down twilight musings the bluebird if we take—

      alphabetical index of poem titles About the Author Also by Copyright

       THE PLEASURES OF THE DAMNED

       the mockingbird

      the mockingbird had been following the cat

       all summer

       mocking mocking mocking

       teasing and cocksure;

       the cat crawled under rockers on porches

       tail flashing

       and said something angry to the mockingbird

       which I didn’t understand.

      yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway

       with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,

       wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,

       feathers parted like a woman’s legs,

       and the bird was no longer mocking,

       it was asking, it was praying

       but the cat

       striding down through centuries

       would not listen.

      I saw it crawl under a yellow car

       with the bird

       to bargain it to another place.

      summer was over.

       his wife, the painter

      There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,

       and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like

       insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,

       says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.

      “I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are at work.”

      He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he

       fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like

       a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled