Charles Bukowski — Not the Sky

Man in the sun she reads to me from the New Yorker which I don't buy don't know how it got in here but something about the mafia one of the heads of the mafia who ate too much, and had it too easy too many fine women patting his walnuts he got fat sucking up good cigars and young breath and he had these heart attacks so one day, somebody's driving him in his big car along the road and he doesn't feel so good and he asks the boy to stop and let him out and the boy lays him out along the road in the fine sunshine i don't know whether it's Crete or Sicily or Italy proper but he's lying there in the sunshine and before he dies he says, "how beautiful life can be" and then he's gone sometimes you've got to kill four or five thousand men before you somehow get to believe that the sparrow is immortal money is piss and that you've been wasting your time sing to gods, or kangaroos the fire circles like a worm inside the radio it is the nuns it is the nuns it is the nuns with yellow teeth dancing in the sun it is ladders gone mad with brain and wrinkling in the air like tragedy my, my, my, it gets so fearful it gets so fearful it gets me, wrinkles me without consultation birds in my dreams walking with kings people in my world walking like nightmares it gets fearful like; gas, barbwire, picture books of doctors, the history of the world i need pans of ice i need colored tubes to spit light into eyes i need straighter backs, money, watchdogs, a horse in Florida and afternoons to throw away like old napkins i need forty-five days to sleep i need to beat hell out of somebody i need to kneel among roses like a madman and sing to gods or kangaroos however you spell it out and however you spell it out it's going nowhere and I'm going with it of all the beauty I can think of is maybe ten minutes of staring at an old bell nobody knows about or smelling my toes like a cranky kid or thirty minutes with John Dillinger, listening to how it happened of all the beauty I can think of, is watching a long freight of boxcars go by sunburnt and hurt and wooden myself watching, watching yet, now all I can see is some kind of color a green thin-yellow, steamlike threads, warm belonging and not belonging all I can see is windows and streets and dirt that wants to cry it is getting late and the shades go down pictures of long-legged girls stroll through my brain and the caterpillar wants to speak my name it knows me, it does the nuns dance