Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski Page B

there’s something good in you, you may not know it, but there is, and forgive all the comas and loose talk…it is so odd to hear a sound out of all this madness. I am not so good at talking on the phone, or talking at all and though I say small things, hesitant dull things, it is only shame and lack of heart and lack of ability and all the lacks that keep me from expressing what should be, and when the phone is put down I always feel as if I have failed—not only in ordinary failure but in a failure that affects everything: myself and you and tomorrow morning and any way the smoke blows. [* * *]
    Ann, I think you should know this—I am not primarily a poet, I hate god gooey damned people poets messing the smears of their lives against the sniveling world, and poets are bad and the world is bad and we are here, ya. What I am trying to say is that poetry, what I write, is only one tenth of myself—the other 9/to hell tenths are looking over the edge of a cliff down into the sea of rock and wringing swirl and cheap damnation. I wish that I only could suffer in the classic style and carve out of great marble that would last centuries beyond this dog’s bark I now hear outside of my 1963 window, but I am damned and slapped and chippied and wasted down to the nothingness of my arms and eyes and fingers and this letter tonight, May first or second, 1963, after hearing your voice upon the phone.
    I deserve to die. I wait upon death like a plumed falcon with beak and song and talon for my caged blood. This may sound pretty god damned pretty but it is not. The poetry part of me, the seeming actuality, what I write, is dung and dross and saliva and old battleships sinking. I know that when the world—which is fairly cheap and stylish and what? what?—forgets a little of the poetry that I have written, it will not be entirely the fault of the world—mainly because I do not think of writing, and only the edge of the knife…where I spread the butter or cut the onion keeps practice in the verse of my mind.
    You do not know how much your call meant although I was seemingly dull and drab and stupid, but I do wish you would not do it again because I know how things are going for you and yours (not so good) and I don’t want the few good people of the world hurt because of buk the puke. (Someone once wrote me that Buk rhymed with puke and she was correct, not only in manner, which is bad, but also in the way the chandeliers work their still lightning in an empty room) and I say, everything is pretty good now but I of course don’t know when or if or what the next o my god stroke of everything will bring, which is a coward’s viewpoint, and all drowning men are cowards, hear them scream, and life is what? what? going down into the water, and it is not the cutting off of air and light and lung and eye and love that counts—it’s the itch they put into us making us wonder why the hell we are here. For these few things. Like a phone call from Sacramento at 7:30 p.m. I don’t know, I don’t know, and it is so sad. If I could give tears to make it right we would all drown in my sick tears. I hardly know what to do. I drink too much. Or not enough. I gamble. I make love to women who only exist within their bodies and I look against the flakes of their eyes and I know that I am lying to myself and to them because I am no less than a dog, and love or the act should contain more than a couple of steaks in a frying pan or else all is lost like weeds in a garden or snails stepped upon and crushed and left in some sort of slime which contains life, smashed life forever and foreboding.
    This poetry-thing is the worst sort of crutch. It weakens a man. And if a man is weak before he writes poetry he becomes, finally, through the strumming of shadows and wailing, he becomes finally what he is—just another fine pink juicy boy doing his god damned job in the frailest and most vomiting way.
    You’ve got to understand that there are other ways