Dinosauria, We

(by Charles Bukowski)


Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter
*

English Sonnet

wind!   how the animals remember Noah

this itself is mind restlessly fleet

beckoning down your dark like a smoke boa

to drink it back in green on your two feet

one wonders how these things are o’er-mastered

for fires cannot blaze on fuellessly

nor can a horse walk straight when he is plastered

and all of sense dissolves thus lastly

o granite moon should you ever go out

like the stone hearth at morning writ in charcoal

crushed cold from your crater the words I doubt

that there will not be silence of the soul

at the end of whatever we discover   then

forget I was once a high bouncing lover

Cnoc Song

hers is the stone like a cnoc

   mountain rills are crawling crystal

      down the valley at night

      toward my box and my oaken floor

who carries what the box

   cries like windfall

      that blows through

      the shadow of my flukes  

who is lost but

   finds winter heretofore

      in the sharp flank

      of the still cold north

while the sea rages by ice

   my dear and froth that freezes

      on breaming waves

      and salt in a felt slipper

who climbs the rock face

   for your health and welfare

      in the oaken valley

      of the old flipper

Mandrake

the clock o’ one in

the beginning stung

every little son

on red flannel fields

the fabled wayward

mind gone craquelure

unsteadied the view

of flowers sprawling

on the starry mask―

if the inhuman

fabric falls away

this late in a life

shows blackly the back

of the remotest

odorless lurking

not this no not this

is a pretty truth

in the ancient sense

vicarious not

hard to disbelieve

‘til the tentacles

of it clutch the breast

and seethe there   pulsing

   inoculating

cool poison   wherefore

should they not so do

now little mandrake

at the clock o’ two?

IT'S A COCK AND BULL STORY 
THE TALLEST TALE EVER TOLD 
AN OVER BAKED T; H ; E ; O ; R ;Y
A NEW ART MADE OF THE OLD

I wonder how much of the sun has already been used?
mandatory optimism
as usual
willful ignorance
maintained by a pinhead lobby
of invisible deities
they are busy being happily wounded together
how did you know I would ask that?
propinquity breeds objectivity
the sun is over the roof
but you wouldn’t know it
by the foot prints filling up steadily with black snow
*

dissidents are tortured back into dust
in the name of our valuables
it’s very hard to describe hellfire
sucking the oxygen out of the air
or symbiotic parasites taxing our hallucinations
driving us into their arms
in full knowledge of the default
immoral moment with a full stomach
full of fresh air
the mere poetics of our dubious limits
wobble the wheelchair-paradigm digging its teeth
into gravity
I stack your pancakes on columns of nickles
Oh beautiful feeling that makes everything more beautiful!
*

He's Dead

I’m dying to weep for Francis Sweeney,

dead in his eighties, a little too young

   for me, I’m hoping for a longer stint

on earth; lot’s to do ‘fore the last dog’s hung.

   It’s a life of oglemoon and sunsquint

         into the dark finis―

manufacturing that aesthetic thrill,

   so long as it doesn’t pay you dim sum

   at all. It’s only ripe as freedom,

a door you open into a deep hill.

A drop in the salmon ladder really;

what do you reckon in earthly years?

   O, rare fertile roe in my wake when I rowed

the fishful of dreams unweepable tears

   to your little son over the charred road,

         which looms ungenteely.

Just beyond where the voltage sags the clay,

   someone holds a picture of your mother.

   ―This is all that’s left, they say. But smother

any concern, for you are well on your way.

  

At my deposition, Fran, you sported      

a bow tie! Some legal types, suing for you.

   I never did learn how it all turned out.

We went on to live as if this life were new;

   I put the melancholy ash to rout

         but it merely loitered

between our plots of brain material.

   There must have been a hole in your fabric

   the shape of his last moments, a rubric                         

I repeat, now that you’re ethereal.

My elegy for the elder binding

tie makes glaring the strangeness of my truth,

   a thing received of each sole emptiness.

My breath and selfish ways have gone aloof,

   so must it be, the very thing you bless―

         This is the last finding.

Somewhere in a library, bowdlerized,

   because they’re each one’s untouchable quinx,

   are books printed in invisible inks,

weightless tomes, imperfectly realized.

Somehow this has to do with Solipsism

because the very Greeks of knowledge light

   up like little planets going round me

when I catch them in my sundance flashfright.

   Which is to cry “I’m buried here, Sweeney,

         under a head schism."

I can wait with dignity forever

   if it means the non-believer suffers

grace as it pours it’s hail on strange, never

   to know for certain if it will snuff hers.

Mirage

Hawk roasting a

pig in the wild

thick tines of

hedge wenned from

a plain sense of

trackless waste

  in a man―

the sword that’s

erupted upon

it is built with

a practice, airy

sayings that must

be retooled with

the clear and

level mirage

   of one’s gaze―

when the hedge

is coals the pig

  is done, whispering,

  the hawk files (sic)

    away (the sayings).

Tron

Bink bonk went the Tron eating silicon bits

and the lovely trees Daphned about the orchard

formerly as young girls ungainly looped behind ―

   their quirks of charm fresh as a wave

      through the golden dry acres. 

Wit-free after long offgassing   

as the trees so near to the underworld

come a-moulting glass feathers as in molten-flowing,

   now cool, like cellophane, as ambience ―

     Tron! Glory ‘o the dry gold hills!

The programmer is lonely, isn’t it, Joe?

Well, see through it, Jack, said the VRP.

A dodecahedron of open faces

      where swim the universes,

      laving, then breaching, firewalls;

In the realm of the emanating strophe ―

in one realm, the place and it’s cargo poised

with most of all of it at the back, awake;

      and the food Tron must survive on

      bubbles like the sun in his throat. 

Invisible Weeds of Puissance and Pulchritude

There are hidden precincts as close as skin

To you, simulposed, one on another―

   Closed cavern on vacant nether.

   Yes…  covert are the fields they’re in.

      You go to a back lot

But don’t see the cave, where, I shit you not,―

I battle my own little Ragnarok,

Scarred by the event as a scald must be,

Missing you in the weeds where you stop to pee.

Where you loft your mindwave against the pale

Yellow edge of the concourse―  the daylight world.

   There your cognition may be purled

   Like a cul-de-sac; but, please, Hail!

      The sacramental pitch―

Tumbleweeded flats, perimeter’d by ditch,

That ants abandoned, squatted on by witch―

All but the mine, the middle of alone,

Where the twilight reigns and the gods turn stone.  

We must, perforce, the ancient rites perform―

The inchoate myth, and the phantasm

   Otherness, just a brief spasm

   From solitude to where we’re borne,

      Into the home life, dear―

A ramble in the empty meadows where

The secret places are from year to year,

The well-swept ground under the temple shell

Where, together, all things may, lonely, dwell.   

The Consolation of Poetry

Lumpen inhales this way and he can die here.

The head turns inwardwise to look at what drives out;  

Which obsessions commandeer, what silent hives abut

The bee glade, what constructions over cellar-fear

Are tilting toward effluvia. Odors of rose

Musk turn stink in the plexus that makes the world.

Despite, senses oppose: the projection is hurled

Upon the rocks and waters; while some suppose

The mind is bent under run-on propositions,

Thought experiments in a requisitioned skull,

Quotidian fissions blasting around a small

Wilderness in a universe of omissions.

Make it the case that the clock hands run widdershins.

That gnome doctors dig for the curative specie

Through cave-bound winds in a brain that bides uneasy.

Spring forward the horse, the rider and all his sins.

Is there art in the final illuminated

Hallways of the gods? The aggregate disperses

Into it’s several inks. The rare nib solved verses

Starring Sphinx― now he too shall be extirpated.

Nocturne: What Thing

The stairwell holds you in the light

The moon let slip over the sill.

Now remove yourself from the thin

Sample of air in which you’ve been.

Behold the Night! A secret chill

Sustains her silent chords. The slight

   White tremors on the Earth

      Craze the frost

   Into mute chinks of mirth.

      Night is fast

   Falling and shall uptake

   You in arms widely awake.

   That she knows you best,

   Let you contented rest.

Then, when she lays you in the brake,

   Her privilege to forsake,

Let Dawn say what thing ye shall make.

Thyrsus

Three spores in a thyrsus, divine,
    fly to my eyne! Under the sky,
a goddlet little thing of vine
    and leaf, drunken, splendidly wry,
    lifts up a beaming rosy thigh,
props a lolling tumid lily,
    nods and browses in her valley,
laps from his purple lips a sigh,
    “Is there no end to her folly?”

The milkmaids linger. Her dawn’s-flesh,
    black-rock eyes, mesh with old root-fires.
Like lasers in a fog at dawn they rush
    through fields of milling wind, loop flyers,
    valent, avid, their wombs like gyres
turning magnetic purple clouds
    piled in ventral glades; and lauds
pour forth from tongues as rain expires  
    damp breath the little deaths enshrouds.

Sobering one day the grape-faced
    barley-mad straight-laced bhang-farm czar
replaced the mortlette of all grace
    atop the staff of near and far
    (his ways of dalliance ajar),
let all the lithe days of sunshine
    and silk jet nights of wild feline
purring from the lush muscular
    foliage at last bend down his spine.

Little Nonette became taller
    by a cellar and a hairdo;
Autumn couldn't help but holler
    on arrival at the rare view,
    from the aft end of the purlieu:
set like a jewelstone in a timepiece,
    too fearfully historic, prime
for the mythos of the issue
    out of the field into the wine

On the night of the Waning Gibbis
she ran
golden in line to meet me
to her death
did she know?
the dog committing
suicide
tumbled her last breath