endure; I must learn to give way, that is not a
suspicious thing.
we are far too serious, we must learn to juggle
our heavens and our hells—the game is playing
us, we must play back.
our shoes walk along, carrying
us.
when it gets at its worst, nothing should be
done.
the exactitude is the freedom: one hundred
thousand walls or more
and more
of nothingness, your bones know more than your
mind.
the only life
I was like one of those nuts from centuries past, I was
Romantically mad with my fixation—ha, ha, to be a
writer, I wrote night and day. I even wrote when I was
asleep
and most often I wrote when I was drunk, even when I
wasn’t writing.
ah, those dozens of cheap rooms, my belly flattened to
my asshole, I became 133 pounds on a 6 foot
frame. I STARVED. haha, so I could write.
(this is a true story) (aren’t they all?) and
all my writings came back and I finally had to
throw them away because
there was more space of paper than there was space of
me
and I continued to write new works which continued to
come back and I thought
Schopenhauer, Van Gogh, Shostakovich, Céline, Dos-
toevsky
and I continued to write and it came back
again
and I thought
Villon, Gorky, Turgenev, Sherwood Anderson
and I wrote and wrote
and still nothing happened
and when I finally did EAT
you have no idea how
BEAUTIFUL FOOD CAN TRULY BE, EACH BITE LIKE A MIRACLE OF
SUNLIGHT TO THE STAGGERING SOUL, haha,
and I thought,
Hamsun, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot
but nothing happened—
all my typewriters to hock and gone I
printed the pages in ink
and they came back
and I threw them away
and wrote some more and starved some
more.
oh, I had an apprenticeship, I did, and now I’ve had a bit of
luck, some are beginning to think that I can write, but
actually only the writing is the thing, now as it was then,
whether yes or no or in between, it’s only the writing, it’s
the only go when all else says stop
and some of it still comes back now and I think
Nietzsche, e. e. cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Sartre, Camus,
Hemingway
the sound of the machine, the sound of the machine, words
biting into paper, there is nothing else, there can be nothing
else, whether it comes back, whether it stays and when
it ends, ha
ha.
stomping at the Savoy
now look, Captain, I want the walking wounded at
their posts, we can’t spare a man, if these
Huns knew our ranks were thinning they’d
eat us alive and rape our women and children
and, god help us, our pets
too!
out of water? have them drink their blood!
what do you think this is, a fucking
picnic?
I’ll give you your picnic up your
ARSE! get
that?
now look . . . we lure them in, outflank them,
they’ll be gobblin’ their own shit in
panic!
we’ll have their bones for picket fences!
you’ll be heroes to our ladies, they’ll
lick your balls gratefully into Eternity!
got that?
quitters don’t win, and besides that, any
man I see retreating, I’m gonna blow a hole
in him big enough so you’ll be able to see
your grandmother’s asshole picking daisies in
Petaluma!
hear me?
oh shit! I BEEN HIT! get the doc! get all
the docs!
cocksucker! whoda guessed? lucky shot!
those Huns couldn’t hit a wet dream at
3 paces!
Captain! you’re in command! you blow this
thing and I’m gonna twist your legs and stuff
’em up your stupid rear! got it?
I don’t want those Huns finger-fucking Melba
on the veranda!
God’s on our side! He told me once, “Listen,
those Huns gotta go! they don’t wash under
the armpits and they comb their hair with
peach jelly!”
Captain! I think I’m going! get a nurse
here, I need some head! and hurry! this
war ain’t got all day!
the glory days
the dead rivers run backwards into nowhere,
the fish cry through neon memories,
and I remember you drunk in bed
in that cheap hotel room
with nobody to live with but me,
what a trundling hell that must have
been, you with
a young sot ten years your junior
pacing the floor in his shorts while
bragging to the deaf gods while
smashing glasses against the walls.
you were certainly caught out of place and
time,
your marriage broken on stained
tiles
and you
being humped by a
bewhiskered jerk who was terrorized by
life, beaten by the odds, this
thing
pacing the floor, rolled wet cigarette
in monkey mouth, then
stopping to
open another bottle of cheap
wine.
the dead rivers of our lives,
hearts like rocks.
pour the red blood of wine.
curse, complain, wail, sing
in that cheap hotel room.
you, awakening . . . “Hank?”
“yeh . . . here . . . what the fuck you
want?”
“hell, gimme a drink . . .”
the waste
yet the courage of the
gamble.
where’s the rent due coming from?
I’ll get a job.
you’ll get a job.
yeah, fat chance. fat shit
chance
anyhow, enough wine gets you past
thinking.
I break a large drinking glass against the
wall.
the phone rings.
it’s the desk clerk again:
“Mr. Chinaski, I must warn you . . .”
“AH, GO WARN YOUR MOTHER’S CUNT!”
the slamming of the phone.
power.
I am a man.
you like me, you like that.
and, I’ve got brains too, I’ve always
told you that.
“Hank?”
“yeh?”
“how many bottles we got left?”
“3.”
“good.”
pacing the floor, looking to fly, looking
to live.
neon memories cry the fish.
4th floor of a 6th street hotel, windows
open to the city of hell, the precious breathing
of the lonely pigeons.
you drunk in bed, me playing at miracle,
wine-bottle corks and full ashtrays.
it’s like everybody’s dead, everybody’s
dead with their heads on,
we’ve got to conquer the flailing of
nowhere.
look at me in undershirt and s
horts,
bare feet bleeding shards of glass.
there’s some way out that begins with
3 bottles
left.
congrats, Chinaski
as I near 70
I get letters, cards, little gifts
from strange people.
congratulations, they tell
me,
congratulations.
I know what they mean:
the way I have lived
I should have been dead in half
that time.
I have piled myself with a mass of
grand abuse, been
careless toward myself
almost to the point of
madness,
I am still here
leaning toward this machine
in this smoke-filled room,
this large blue trashcan to my
left
containers.
the doctors have no answers
and the gods are
silent.
congratulations, death,
on your patience.
I have helped you all that
I can.
now one more poem
and a walk out on the balcony,
such a fine night there.
I am dressed in shorts and stockings,
gently scratch my old
belly,
look out there
look off there
where dark meets dark
it’s been one hell of a crazy
ball game.
he went for the windmills, yes
something to keep you going is needed
badly
as the milkmaids now scream obscenities
in sundry dialects,
the mill is shut down,
there are mass murders at hamburger
joints,
friar Tuck is screwed,
the United States ranks 17th of the
nations in longevity of the
individual,
and nobody wipes the windshield.
the beast sleeps in Beverly Hills,
Van Gogh is an absentee billionaire,
the Man from Mars deals the ace of
spades,
Hollywood goes soap opera,
the horse rides the jock,
the whore blows congress,
the cat is down to one life,
the dead end street is a psychiatrist,
the table is set with fish-head fantasies,
the dream strikes like a blackjack in the men’s
crapper,
the homeless are rolled,
the dice are fixed,
the curtain is down,
the seats are empty,
the watchman has suicided,
the lights are out,
nobody waits for Godot
something to keep you going is needed
badly,
madly,
right now
in the burning forest
in the dying sea
in the dull sonnets
and the wasted
sunrises,
something is needed
here
besides this rotten
music,
these shorn decades,
this place like this,
this time,
yours,
mutilated, spit
away,
a mirror’s back, a
hog’s teat;
a seed upon a rock,
cold,
not even the death of
a cockroach
now.
all my friends
Van Gogh just walked in and complained to me
that Theo had sent him the wrong
paints.
he was gone no longer than a moment
when Dostoevsky knocked and asked for a
loan to play the roulette wheel,
claimed he was working on a masterpiece,
something called Crime and Punishment
then Chatterton knocked and asked if I might
have some rat poison, said he had an idea of
how to get away from the rats.
Villon sat around bitching half the night about
how he had been barred from Paris—not for his
writings but simply because of some petty
thievery, really, he said, a chickenshit deal.
then Ernie came in, he was drunk, and he started
talking about the bullfights, that’s all he talks about:
the bullfights and fishing, the BIG one that got away,
and he’s always on the war, the war, the war.
I was glad when he left.
Picasso came in then and complained that his
shack job, who was also a painter, was jealous of
him, she thought she could paint but was being
held back because she was a woman and that some
day she would paint a book about him calling him a
the only fame which she thirsted so badly for.
then Knut Hamsun came in and claimed he was
framed in the war crimes deal.
followed by Ezra who spoke of the same thing.
followed by the good doctor, Céline.
then H.D. came in and said, “I only wish now that I
had used my real name, Hilda Doolittle, to hell with
the Imagist Manifesto, it ended up anyhow that when
people saw ‘H.D.,’ all they did was reverse the initials
and think of that fucker, D. H. Lawrence.”
then Mozart, the x-child prodigy knocked and asked
for a nickel, I gave it to him, what a fake pretending to be
in trouble after writing more symphonies than any man
I can ever remember.
then there was Ernie again, asking to borrow a shot gun
shell, claiming he had a special game in
mind.
I let him have it.
then Borodin knocked, claiming his wife made him sleep on
the stairway and always raised hell when he pressed his teabag
with a spoon.
after that I got tired of all the knocks and all the people—I kept
screaming at Beethoven to go away but he kept knocking—
so I cut the lights, stuck in my earplugs and went to sleep
but it was no good because I had this nightmare and here was
this Van Gogh fellow again, only he had not only cut off one ear
but both ears, I mean, he really looked frigged-over, and he sent
one ear to one prostitute and the other to another and the first
prostitute gagged and tossed the ear over her left shoulder but
the second prostitute just laughed, pulled down her panties and
chugged the ear up her rectum saying, “now I can hear the pricks
entering and the shit dropping.”
then I awakened and Hemingway’s skull bones and blood dripped
down on me from the
ceiling.
a reader writes
“Dear Mr. Chinaski:
I still like your writing but I liked it
better back then, I mean when you were
writing things like, ‘when she bent over I
saw all that ass.’ Or
you wrote about the drunk tanks and the rats
and the roaches and the mice.
I liked all your troubles with women, I have
troubles with women too and I really dug what
you were getting at.
I liked all the craziness, the back alley
fights, the police raids.
Let’s have more of this, it keeps me going.
I know it won’t mean shit to you but I’m
going to tell you, anyhow.
There’s a
group of us and we get oiled, we
put on Frank Sinatra records and read your stuff
out loud.
Give us some more of the old
stuff.
yeah, yeah!”
Dear Reader:
About Mr. Sinatra, let’s forget that, but I
must tell you that I am now 70 years old and it’s
a surprise to me too but if I went on writing about
peeking up women’s asses I wouldn’t have time to
write about how my cat walks across the floor while
carrying the secrets of Eternity to my brain, I mean,
look, you can write something to death, most do when
they find it sells books but I don’t write to sell
books I write to keep my psyche’s guts from drowning
in the dung-filled waters of this so-called Existence.
Take Hemingway, he wrote himself into the same tight
circle which eventually closed and squeezed him to
death.
Take J. D. Salinger, he wrote lively and compelling
tales of ethyl youth but when he grew older there
was no such thing left to write about.
Specialization is death, bad rotten candy.
Gamble is the only out, you have to keep throwing
new dice.
On women, they are over-rated because we over-rate
them.
You really can’t expect me to go on writing about the
big asses of some women.
But I did have some problems, a few doubts about
leaving this vast and lucrative area—for I was getting
more than the rent by doing so and so why take a chance
about writing about, say, a one-winged bluebird struggling
in a stack of mulch?
I had to, that’s why, and take away the rent and more,
and I’ll still have to.
I make no excuses for my subject matter and it makes no
excuses for me.
Like, I once knew a popular song writer who had a
problem—he had gotten famous by writing down and out
songs about life in Hollywood motels and he lived in
this one and got rich and famous and he still kept
living there, afraid that if he left that place he’d
lose his persona and his popularity.
But actually, it makes no sense for a rich man to be
living in a cheap Hollywood motel because it just
isn’t the same as a poor man living there.
Luckily for him they closed the place down and he
didn’t have to pretend anymore.