Chinaski, Chinaski come over here
God Chinaski you stink of beer
Your late again and your work is slow
I should write you up, one more and they will let you go

Chinaski thinks to himself you'll see, I will not conform to who you think I should be
You can stuff your job, the pay is lousy anyway
I have better ways to pass my days

Down to the civic Chinaski did trot
They wrote up his resignation and cut him a cheque
Chinaski took it with great cheer walked down the road and bought a couple bottles of wine and a fifth of ***** and a six pack of beer

He got in his car and off to the track to blow the lot on some halfpenny nag
And to pick up a lady to befriend, maybe get lucky and back to mine, where we can share some bottles of wine

If not so lucky then that's fine by me, I'll get drunk and write my short stories
There's been one constant in my life, longer even than I was married to my wife
That's my typewriter it's special you see
It follows me from room to room, cheers me up when I feel gloom
I put the paper in and turn the carriage and start to write of love and marriage of growing up and moving out, of fights and bars and women and cars.

I write of being on the street of all the women that I meet
I write of work and racing, I write of hardship that I'm facing

I write of the tough life I've had but I don't write it for you to be sad
I write to make you smile and laugh
I write because it helps you see, I write it to cleanse me

If I make you happy along the way then well what really is there left to say

Have a good day, have a Chinaski day

the phone rang at 1:30 a.m.
  and it was a man from Denver:
  
   "Chinaski, you got a following in
  Denver..."
    "yeah?"
   "yeah, I got a magazine and I want some
  poems from you..."
    "*******, CHINASKI!" I heard a voice
  in the background...
   "I see you have a friend,"
  I said.
   "yeah," he answered, "now, I want
  six poems..."
    "CHINASKI *****! CHINASKI'S A *****!"
  I heard the other
  voice.
    "you fellows been drinking?"
  I asked.
    "so what?" he answered. "you drink."
    "that's true..."
   "CHINASKI'S AN *******!"
    then
  the editor of the magazine gave me the
  address and I copied it down on the back
  of an envelope.
    "send us some poems now..."
    "I'll see what I can do..."
   "CHINASKI WRITES ****!"
   "goodbye," I said.
   "goodbye," said the
  editor.
    I hung up.
    there are certainly any number of lonely
  people without much to do with
  their nights.

Chinaski licked his tongue over the opening of the whiskey bottle, knowing that it wouldn't stop me but he knew it would delay the use for someone else. He kept repeating his poem "she is dark. she is dark. she is reading about god. i am god." and the whiskey label suddenly turned into a lullaby, the only thing able to keep me under water and i heard it with blurry vision. she is dark. i am dark. i am reading about god. he is god. he is blood alcohol content whispering numbers too high for decimals, hoping i'd be my whole self tonight. waking up fractions of a second too close to consistent unconscious, wondering if i could even make it home with muscles meant for the sea floor. I have no legs when i am around him, and He as in Liquor, as in The Only Thing Keeping Me Up Right, The Only Thing Keeping Me Above Ground. I am sinking, slipping under waves crashing over my lungs like the wrong pipe. But he promises he's got the right one, Chinaski blowing O's over my bed frame. He is dark. I am dark. We are reading about God. He is God. Asking where is God? We are sullen prayer folding over the pew, removing shoes to show how raw we are, or are we removing soul? I've got no time to play in the second coming, Chinaski drowning himself in women promising their second coming, I've never admired him. Or Him, making hymn out of moans, telling everyone i am dark. i am dark. i should be reading about god, he is god. I never knew god. I don't know how to read a book considered fiction, running my tongue up the necks of the sacrilegious whimpering out Christ's name like he will know how to sacrifice the hands that tame the unholy. I pray he will learn to split time or bible, explaining truth from love. Chinaski never loved more than once, and that was with the glass in his hand and full gut of scotch. I am dark. I am Chinaski. I am reading about God. He is God.

Hi
I'm 26
I have a really pretty face and thick legs
I've read all your books
And not that you'd care
You're dead
I don't want to *******
But I want you to know
That nothing makes me feel
Worse for someone
Than when they act
Like nothing's wrong
And I think
That's partially your fault.

They may call you fatty,
scruffy and ugly.
Your name may be vile
and I bet you smell awfully
smokes and ***** and
cheap perfumes of many different
******.
But when I look through you
when I see beyond this fog
and almost feel you inside
I know then
you beat the handsome beasts
you beat them all
with the ruin of your heart that you keep
in the drawer of your bedside table
where you pop off beside
now and then.
And it's usually a.m.
It's always a.m.
Just like now
as another night on earth covers us both
as you wish to be a cat in your next life
as the street-lamp peeps into our loneliness
I raise another glass full of youth and despair.
Toast to you, to me.
To the world who never treats some of his guests nicely.
So
I choose writing.
"it keeps the walls
from
failing.”
I need the sound of the words
making love with the typewriter.
But I make do with a pen and paper.
I know you own a typewriter.
My time,
must be a bit shopworn
Have you ever smiled by doing a bracket after a colon?
Guess nineteen ninety-four was a bad year to be born.
but a nice one to die.
Though congratulations
you did well at the computers
well enough, like everything else
You take things as they come
and life teaches you how to get used to them.
You get used to living, you get closer to death.
It is not a big deal, has never been.
But it is the only deal.
A deal we can't deny.

All I wanted to say was a
"happy birthday"
but not that happy.

@mosquito

"There is always one woman
to save you from another
and as that woman saves you
she makes ready to destroy"

Chinaski taught me that

when I was still in
high school and looking for
answers in poetry books.

I managed to find few and
far between in those four years.

Then I became a college
student and my hunt turned
to the wilderness of
crowded bars, living room floors
and enough pills to
swim through
only to drown in the deep end.

I caught my breath in three years
and surfaced to a job I hated
in a town I loathed
but always called
home.

I kept my company but they
never sought to keep me
or so I tell myself.

Really I used every last drop
of them I could get
before the next one rode along
because of what Chinaski told me.

But this one won't ride along again
and I fear the day she does
because
Chinaski might be wrong.

I have just spent one-hour-and-a-half
handicapping tomorrow's
card.
when am I going to get at the poems?
well, they'll just have to wait
they'll have to warm their feet in the
anteroom
where they'll sit gossiping about
me.
"this Chinaski, doesn't he realize that
without us he would have long ago
gone mad, been dead?"
"he knows, but he thinks he can keep
us at his beck and call!"
"he's an ingrate!"
"let's give him writer's block!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
the little poems kick up their heels
and laugh.
then the biggest one gets up and
walks toward the door.
"hey, where are you going?" he is
asked.
"somewhere where I am
appreciated."
then, he
and the others
vanish.
I open a beer, sit down at the
machine and nothing
happens.
like now.
from the 1997 Black Sparrow New Year's greeting, "A New War"

“Mom, I’m not an idiot.”
She had been off her meds,
I could swear it.
The same nagging voice
As if I was a child,
“Jonathan David, I give you
money and the first thing
you buy is *****?”

What did she want,
An informal letter of my condition?

I apologized for having
a father as a drunk,
And a mother that took
more pills than she could stomach.

She hung up,
And I took another drink.

I've never read poems by other poets the way I read Bukowski's poetry
His legacy feeds my intense hunger for something other than what I know

And

It is worth my dollar
to learn more of what he thought
about the rigmarole of life, humans and ***.

Chinaski whispers to me

"Never try, never try"

I'm hanging limp on these words,
dangling before such expression

But it's Bandini that has me
breathless and freshly dead,
when he speaks in my head

"You are nobody, and I might
have been somebody, and the
road to each of us is love.”

man oh man
i am giddy like a child when i read you baby
lets go back to your room and bang until the sun burns out

So Chinaski took down Hem,
eh Buk?
I could take your cardboard mask
anyday
because i know he's more of a paper tiger
than the commies hoped america would be.

I'm crazier than you
and i'm willing to bet
my pecker against yours;
if you win
i'll chop it off with a rusty cleaver
and we can braid eachother's hair
while we tape my pecker onto the tip of yours
and spray silly string and ***** into my wound.

So what you got?
Huh? How crazy can you get?

After all,
i think you died naturally.
I still got time in these bones
to walk onto campus with
a gallon of gas
and a pack of menthol cigarettes,
asking to *** a lighter.

How crazy
have they become?
And how crazy do you think
it will make me?

Henry Chinaski.
Oh how I think of you on long nights.
How I compare myself to you,
In present.
And future.
Henry Chinaski.
We seem alike,
You and I.
But that's what I'm afraid of.

and nobody gets those people who don't give a **** about anyone or anything. those people who burn others down without a second thought. chinaski, the man in all of bukowski's poems. it is those people who cared the most because all we want to be loved, so badly that sometimes we sustain from love itself. we need to be loved so badly. so badly that the fear of not being loved is greater than the need to be loved. to care is a disease that corrodes your bones if you use it too much. sometimes i burn other people just so i dont have to feel the sting first, i confess, but thats who youre turning me into, but who gives a ****, one day ill change my name and write a book.
whatever. i used to be belligerent, but then all of my friends died. now im a fire build in the pervade of a never ending rainstorm. its my depression, but everyone calls me killer because i pass them cigarettes even though their boyfriends hate the smell.
i don't need you and you don't need me. you dont care about books, or poetry, or silence, or experience, or art. ive known that since the moment i met you, but i thought you wanted to know. ukulele girl and the basketball star. BUT thats just why youll never know me, youll never know my brain, youll never be able to think my thoughts.
IT IS SO ******* EASY TO LOVE ME
EVERYONE IS TOO LAZY TO LOVE ME
STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST, NICK, if you want to know someone you have to learn at least three of their muses for they make up most of the person you want to get to knowing. then if you really want to know them, better than they know themselves, learn three of their three muse's muses. thats why i gave you love is a dog from hell and grapes of wrath. bukowski loved hemingway.
thats why i go to all your stupid basketball games alone just to sit in the desolate student section because i want to take the time to understand the love of someone i love. people arent the same as me. they look at the world, and its too big to fit the whole picture in front of their faces, so they cant fathom it. but to me it seems easy. but thats just why love ever lasts.
no one wants to know their lovers three muses three muses. as if it is so hard to read a god ****** book. everyone is so greedy they want to gobble up the soul of the first thing they think is beautiful. they dont want to keep them like a cactus in their bedroom, they just snip them at the stem and put them on a shelf just to watch them as they rot.
because everyone thinks that to love is to own.
but when i read poetry i feel intoxicated. i will sit there and read a poem until its meaning is exhausted because, to me, it is so rich to experience a feeling so vividly. my heart quiets to a slow beat in my chest, just to hear the words quiet in my head. thats how love should always feel. it should be reading everyone of your lovers metaphorical books  just so you can know them better. because knowing them makes you feel whole.
but if you want to leave then why dont you just go

Being loved,
when no one asked,
is a weird feeling.

Sponsor numbers,
and Ibprophen,
reading,
feeding,
what's for breakfast tomorrow?
Hope with a guilty side,
Chinaski hidden in a,
recovery library,
words to the poet,
a secret vice,
are nostalgic tremors,
a giggle for the unknown,
terminal uniqueness,
and a desk map with no ****,
pray for the piggly wiggly roommate,
the hope overpowers the guilt,
and the coffee makes,
me smile,
a good day,
a better,
turn,
click.

If you gave me a bottle of cheap
Red wine
Every day
Put me in a one bedroom
Bungalow
Off of Hollywood & Western
In the late 70s
Give me an endless
Harem of women
Pay my bills
$2 six packs of beer

....I’d be able to write some epic **** too...

Reading him is like                                                             ­                 
eating fine chocolates from a white box
Just one or two is not enough
But too many and you run the risk
of them seeming all the same
And if you really over indulge
you might ***** them all up
and never eat chocolates again

Reading at the bar
Drinking at the library
         —Henry Chinaski

i don't understand why the English perception concerning philosophy is one supposing that of pomp, that somehow an interest in philosophy is not respected, even undermined by the necessary poke-joke that it's all about being pompous - perhaps i'm in such a social position that i only encounter people content with their own self-serving answers, and that somehow, someone else's insight is dangerous, or pointless, or perhaps even like a **** - before you even utter a word, your work is worth as much as a fly on ****, deemed merely "intellectual *******", well, **** me... did anyone ever consider the dangers of philosophising?

and what are the dangers? there are plenty to mind.
imagine yourself opening Kant's *critique from where
you left off - the critique of all theology pouring from
the speculative principles of reason -
already from the rubric i can tell you,
you have no arms and no legs -
we already know the Santa Claus God of those less
fortunate than us, let's leave their "supposed
extravagance and childishness to them", thank them
for even considering such a venture, making our's
easier but also more demanding -
by god i mean: there's always a subject waiting for us,
a plenitude of subjects, the necessary plural vagary -
evidently, because there's no "man in the sky" -
no object to speak of as one might consider a mountain;
every single time, i wake up and something's bugging me -
that time at Christmas when i was visiting my
grandparents, took 200ml of flavoured ***** through
the countryside, stumbled into Church for a mass
(out of the blue), heard the nuns praying for alcoholics,
and when the holy communion came round
i clocked my own blood from the benches -
**** the wine, i needed something more potent -
evidently some little kid got interested and asked her
poor mama what the man was doing -
my own sacrament darling, my own - there ain't a palm
tree from here for miles and miles, seven mountains and
seven rivers - did i tell you that the Spartans drank
diluted wine, and when a drunkard stumbled into
their macho midst they gave him pure wine and made him
do a walk of shame down the street? ha ha, hmm; or me
drinking 4 bottles and only feeling a pinch of salt
on the gusto. believe me, philosophy is dangerous,
it's far from pompous - once enthusiastic about it,
you get a different ear for political rhetoric,
but the bigger problem is that you deem so many human
concerns pointless - i was weeding the patio today
thinking - this is utter *******! these weeds are
as dangerous as dirt behind fingernails - not after
nonchalantly glancing at the future prospect of "time wasted",
i.e. talk of a primordial entity as either a microchip
implant in my mind from the basis of reason solely
(theologia rationalis) - or based upon revelation (revelata) -
popiół! a obecano mi *****!
    popiół! a obecano mi *****!
       popiół! a obecano mi *****! (ashes! but i was
                                                                    promised *****!) -
through to transcendental concepts:
          ens originarium, realissimum, ens entium.
truly, after engaging with philosophy enthusiastically
very little begins to matter, there's bound to be some poetry
in the matter - anti-metaphor of the brain in the pickle-jar,
that's you after at least one book of philosophy having been
digested - your legs and feet are suddenly cut off -
all the busy people call this "laziness", in some respect it
is, all you end up doing is the impractical solution to time,
you end up a void, much to the disagreement of others
that that space could be filled with a waiter,
a gardener, a car-boot salesman, a butcher - money
and the exponential rise in professions - no solution
to counter - look in the Amazon rain forest for the real
aliens not on Mars. that's how it is though -
philosophy is more dangerous than pompous, for those
that really get it - as thus in summary: systematisation
is a very cautious approach toward vocabulary -
reading a dense book like Kant's critique you will rarely
see words that would make the author uncomfortable
or look ridiculous - a density is required to systematise -
i get that feeling sometimes, certain words really do stick
out like a sore thumb - they're like a pair of jeans after
only having worn tracksuit bottoms for a month -
you end up thinking the jeans make you walk with coffin-rigidity
(of the corpse, not the coffin itself) -
ah, but still that memory of doing my own "holy" communion
in church with that bottle of ***** - fun while it lasted -
and in the wise of words of Herr Chinaski -
i make the best movies.

If you’re expecting a poem, this isn’t it.

It might not even be prose… I don’t know.

as I write,

a combination of bourbon and rye

with a foamy Guinness finish

is lapping against the walls of my stomach;

I’m intoxicated, and I feel good…

but I digress.


I just want to share the experience.


Anyway, there I was in a Skid Row bar

enjoying my whiskey when I overheard

a conversation.


Bukowski was mentioned.


I happened to have a copy of

‘The People Look Like Flowers at Last’

in my bag, and I - already feeling light and fluffy- took it out and waved it around

as if it were the congressional medal of honor.


A man spoke up. He was a very old man;

wrinkled and hunched over,

and he wore a colorful fedora upon his

(likely) hairless head.


He claimed to have met Bukowski

in the very bar we were drinking in tonight.


I was intrigued; I bought him a drink

and he told me the whole tale.


As it goes, Bukowski was in the bar one night,

drunk and waving his name around and saying things like “oh, c’mon! I’m Charles Bukowski! The writer… the immortal poet.”

It sounded like Chinaski - and this guy

didn't look like much of a reader, so I decided

to give his story some credit.

Anyhow, the man I was speaking with was

there that night, and he had something to say.

He told Bukowski “you’re an *******!

You might be big with the colleges

and the fancy journals, but down here

you’re a drunken ***! Just drink your *****

and shut your ******* mouth!”

He seemed to become angry even as he spoke to me. I was in awe!

There I was - in Skid Row of all places -

sitting as close as I will ever sit

to my greatest influence.