Charles Bukowski

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and

god I got the sad blue blues,
this woman sat there and she
said
are you really Charles

Bukowski?

and I said

forget that

I do not feel good
I've got the sad sads

she's young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
I thought it was all working,
and now it's her again,

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that

Sunday, I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthadox to the
west.

she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible

either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you

when i was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb,unsophisticated.
I had bad blood,a twisted
mind, a pecarious
upbringing.

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.

I reached up into the top of the closet
and took out a pair of blue panties
and showed them to her and
asked "are these yours?"
and she looked and said,
"no, those belong to a dog."

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance