BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
Post Office (1971)
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972)
South of No North (1973)
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955–1973 (1974)
Factotum (1975)
Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977)
Women (1978)
You Kissed Lilly (1978)
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)
Shakespeare Never Did This (1979)
Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)
Ham on Rye (1982)
Bring Me Your Love (1983)
Hot Water Music (1983)
There’s No Business (1984)
War All the Time: Poems 1981–1984 (1984)
You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986)
The Movie: “Barfly” (1987)
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946–1966 (1988)
Hollywood (1989)
Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems (1990)
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970 (1993)
Pulp (1994)
Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s–1970s (Volume 2) (1995)
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories (1996)
Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems (1997)
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (1998)
Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978–1994 (Volume 3) (1999)
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire: New Poems (1999)
Open All Night: New Poems (2000)
The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems (2001)
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski & Sheri Martinelli 1960–1967 (2001)
Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems (2003)
The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems (2004)
Slouching Toward Nirvana (2005)
Come On In! (2006)
The People Look Like Flowers At Last (2007)
The Pleasures of the Damned (2007)
The Continual Condition (2009)
On Writing (2015)
On Cats (2015)
On Love (2016)
On Love
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Edited by Abel Debritto
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2016 by Linda Lee Bukowski
Photograph on page 33 courtesy of Marina Bukowski. All other photographs courtesy of Linda Lee Bukowski
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the USA by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY, 10007
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 728 5
eISBN 978 1 78211 729 2
Contents
the day I kicked a bankroll out the window
I taste the ashes of your death
love is a piece of paper torn to bits
to the whore who took my poems
for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough
a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops
for the 18 months of Marina Louise
poem for my daughter
answer to a note found in the