textfiles/magazines/IBFT/ibft054.txt

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---------------------------- I Bleed for This? ------------------------------
------04.07.96-----------------------------------------------------#054------

                             Drive Through Hell
                            appreciated by IBFT

by Charles Bukowski


relentless as the tarantula
--------------------------- 
they're not going to let you
sit at a front table
at some cafe in Europe
in the mid-afternoon sun.
if you do, somebody's going to
drive by and
spray your guts with a
submachine gun.

they're not going to let you
feel good
for very long
anywhere.
the forces aren't going to
let you sit around
fucking off and
relaxing.
you've got to do it 
their way.

the unhappy, the bitter and
the vengeful
need their 
fix - which is
you or somebody 
anybody
in agony, or
better yet
dead, dropped into some
hole.

as long as there are
human beings about
there is never going to be 
any peace
for any individual
upon this earth (or
anywhere else
they might
escape to)

all you can do
is maybe grab
ten lucky minutes
here
or maybe an hour
there.

something is working toward you
right now, and
I mean you
and nobody but
you.


gay paree
---------
the cafes in Paris are just like you imagine
they are:
very well-dressed people, snobs, and
the snob-waiter comes up and takes your
order
as if you were a 
leper.
but after you get your wine
you feel better
you begin to feel like a snob
yourself
and you give the guy at the next table
a sidelong glance
he catches you and
you twitch your nose
a bit as if you had just smelled
dogshit
then you
look away.

and the food
when it arrives 
is always too mild.
the French are delicate with their
spices.

and
as you eat and drink
you realize that everybody is
terrorized:

too bad
too bad
such a lovely city
full of cowards.

then more wine brings more
realization:
Paris is the world and the world
is
Paris.

drink to it
and
because of
it.

for the concerned:
------------------
if you get married they think you're
finished
and if you are without a woman they think you're
incomplete.

a large portion of my readers want me to
keep writing about bedding down with madwomen and
streetwalkers-
also, about being in jails and hospitals, or
starving or
puking my guts
out.

I agree that complacency hardly engenders an
immortal literature
but neither does
repetition.

for those readers now
sick at heart
believing that I'm a contented
man-
cheer: agony sometimes changes
form 
but
it never ceases for
anybody.

drive through hell
------------------
the people are weary, unhappy and frustrated, the people are
bitter and vengeful, the people are deluded and fearful, the
people are angry and uninventive
and I drive among them on the freeway and they project
what is left of themselves in their manner of driving-
some more hateful, more thwarted than others-
some don't like to be passed, some attempt to keep others 
from passing
--some attempt to block lane changes
--some hate cars of a newer, more expensive model
--others in these cars hate the older cars.

the freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions, it's
humanity on the move, most of them coming from some place
   they
hated and going to another they hate just as much or
more.
the freeways are a lesson in what we have become and
most of the crashes and deaths and collisions
of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented
lives.

when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of
my city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the
heart
away.

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