Gamblers All

sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, 
I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside 
remembering all the times you've felt that way, and 
you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face 
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway, 
get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the 
newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee table, kiss your 
wife goodbye, and then you are backing the car out into life itself, 
like millions of others you enter the arena once more. 

you are on the freeway threading through traffic now, 
moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch 
the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow 
get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull 
days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful 
and so disappointing because 
we are all so alike and so different. 

you find the turn-off, drive through the most dangerous 
part of town, feel momentarily wonderful as Mozart works 
his way into your brain and slides down along your bones and 
out through your shoes. 

it's been a tough fight worth fighting 
as we all drive along 
betting on another day.

As the Poems Go

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.

it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.

leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.

~Bukowski

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.

~Charles Bukowski.
It is possible to hate someone's prose and like his poems. Thank you J for giving me Bukowski.

hmm?

I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

~last lines from a Bukowski poem. I don't know what these lines mean but for some reason they stuck in my head.