Subject: A little Buk
From: Paul Miller (phm@midsouth.rr.com)
Date: Sat Apr 29 2000 - 19:19:13 EDT
Just a little Bukowski on this Saturday evening.
upon reading a critical review
it's difficult to accept
and you look around the room
for the person they are talking
about.
he's not there
he's not here.
he's gone.
by the time they get your book you
are no longer your
book.
you are on the next page,
the next
book.
and worse,
they don't even get the old books right.
you are given credit for things you don't
deserve, for insights that aren't
there.
people read themselves into books, altering
what thay need and discarding what they
don't.
good critics are as rare as good
writers.
and whether I get a good review or a
bad one
I take neither
seriously.
I am on the next page.
the next book.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---->From Betting on the Muse - Poems and Stories Black Sparrow Press, 1996. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------
hell is a lonely place he was 65, his wife was 66, had Alzheimer's disease.
he had cancer of the mouth. there were operations, radiation treatments which decayed the bones in his jaw which then had to be wired.
daily he put his wife in rubber diapers like a baby.
unable to drive in his condition he had to take a taxi to the medical center, had difficulty speaking, had to write the directions down.
on his last visit they informed him there would be another operation: a bit more left cheek and a bit more tounge.
when he returned he changed his wife's diapers put on the tv dinners, watched the evening news then went to the bedroom, got the gun, put it to her temple, fired.
she fell to the left, he sat upon the couch put the gun into his mouth, pulled the trigger.
the shots didn't arouse the neighbors.
later the burning tv dinners did.
somebody arrived, pushed the door open, saw it.
soon the police arrived and went through their routine, found some items:
a closed savings account and a checkbook with a balance of $1.14 suicide, they deduced.
in three weeks there were two new tenants: a computer engineer named Ross and his wife Anatana who studied ballet.
they looked like another upwardly mobile pair.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
>From Septuagenarian Stew Black Sparrow Press, 1990. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------
man in the sun she reads to me from the New Yorker which I don't buy, don't know how they get in here, but it's something about the Mafia one of the heads of the Mafia who ate too much and had it too easy too many fine women patting his walnuts, and he got fat sucking at good cigars and young breasts and he has these heart attacks - and so one day somebody is driving him in his big car along the road and he doesn't feel so good and he asks the boy to stop and let him out and the boy lays him out along the road in the fine sunshine and before he dies he says: how beautiful life can be, and then he's gone.
sometimes you've got to kill 4 or 5 thousand men before you somehow get to believe that the sparrow is immortal, money is piss and that you have been wasting your time.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
>From Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame Selected poems 1955 - 1973 Black Sparrow Press, 1986. First published in: Crucifix in a Deathhand, 1965.
Paul
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