The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills by Charles Bukowski Page A

when?”
     
 
    “not today. too god damned
    tired.”
     
 
    “tomorrow?”
     
 
    “tomorrow, sure.”
     

finish
     
     
    the hearse comes through the room filled with
    the beheaded, the disappeared, the living
    mad.
    the flies are a glue of sticky paste
    their wings will not
    lift.
    I watch an old woman beat her cat
    with a broom.
    the weather is unendurable
    a dirty trick by
    God.
    the water has evaporated from the
    toilet bowl
    the telephone rings without
    sound
    the small limp arm petering against the
    bell.
    I see a boy on his
    bicycle
    the spokes collapse
    the tires turn into
    snakes and melt
    away.
    the newspaper is oven-hot
    men murder each other in the streets
    without reason.
    the worst men have the best jobs
    the best men have the worst jobs or are
    unemployed or locked in
    madhouses.
    I have 4 cans of food left.
    air-conditioned troops go from house to
    house
    from room to room
    jailing, shooting, bayoneting
    the people.
    we have done this to ourselves, we
    deserve this
    we are like roses that have never bothered to
    bloom when we should have bloomed and
    it is as if
    the sun has become disgusted with
    waiting
    it is as if the sun were a mind that has
    given up on us.
    I go out on the back porch
    and look across the sea of dead plants
    now thorns and sticks shivering in a
    windless sky.
    somehow I’m glad we’re through
    finished—
    the works of Art
    the wars
    the decayed loves
    the way we lived each day.
    when the troops come up here
    I don’t care what they do for
    we already killed ourselves
    each day we got out of bed.
    I go back into the kitchen
    spill some hash from a soft
    can, it is almost cooked
    already
    and I sit
    eating, looking at my
    fingernails.
    the sweat comes down behind my
    ears and I hear the
    shooting in the streets and
    I chew and wait
    without wonder.
     

the underground
     
     
    the place was crowded.
    the editor told me,
    “Charley get some chairs from upstairs,
    there are more chairs upstairs.”
    I brought them down and we opened the beer and
    the editor said,
    “we’re not getting enough advertising,
    the boat might go down,”
    so they started talking about how to get
    advertising.
    I kept drinking the beer
    and had to piss
    and when I got back
    the girl next to me said,
    “we ought to evacuate the city,
    that’s what we ought to do.”
     
 
    I said, “I’d rather listen to Joseph Haydn.”
     
 
    she said, “just think of it,
    if everybody left the city!”
     
 
    “they’d only be someplace else
    stinking it up,” I said.
     
 
    “I don’t think you like
    people,” she said, pulling her short skirt down
    as much as possible.
     
 
    “just to fuck with,” I said.
    then I went to the bar next door and
    bought 3 more packs of beer.
    when I got back they were talking Revolution.
    so here I was back in 1935 again,
    only I was old and they were young. I was at least
    20 years older than anybody in the room,
    and I thought, what the hell am I doing
    here?
     
 
    soon the meeting ended
    and they went out into the night,
    those young ones
    and I picked up the phone, I got
    John T.,
    “John, you o.k.? I’m low tonight.
    suppose I come over and get
    drunk?”
     
 
    “sure, Charley, we’ll be waiting.”
     
 
    “Charley,” said the editor, “I guess we’ve got to
    put the chairs back
    upstairs.”
     
 
    we carried the chairs back upstairs
    the
    revolution was
    over.
     

from the Dept. of English
     
     
    100 million Chinese bugs on the stairway to
    hell,
    come drink with me
    rub my back with me;
    this filth-pitched room,
    floor covered with yellow newspapers
    3 weeks old; bottle caps, a red
    pencil, a rip of
    toilet paper, these odd bits of
    broken things;
    the flies worry me as ice cream ladies
    walk past my window;
    at night I sleep, try to sleep
    between mounds of stinking laundry;
    ghosts come out,
    play dirty games, evil games, games of horror with
    my mind;
    in the morning there is blood on the sheet
    from a broken sore upon