Read Love is a Dog from Hell Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski
“your poems about the girls will still be around
50 years from now when the girls are gone,”
my editor phones me.
dear editor:
the girls appear to be gone
already.
I know what you mean
but give me one truly alive woman
tonight
walking across the floor toward me
and you can have all the poems
the good ones
the bad ones
or any that I might write
after this one.
I know what you mean.
do you know what I mean?
escape from the black widow spider
is a miracle as great as art.
what a web she can weave
slowly drawing you to her
she’ll embrace you
then when she’s satisfied
she’ll kill you
still in her embrace
and suck the blood from you.
I escaped my black widow
because she had too many males
in her web
and while she was embracing one
and then the other and then
another
I worked free
got out
to where I was before.
she’ll miss me—
not my love
but the taste of my blood,
but she’s good, she’ll find other
blood;
she’s so good that I almost miss my death,
but not quite;
I’ve escaped. I view the other
webs.
our marriage book, it
says.
I look through it.
they lasted ten years.
they were young once.
now I sleep in her bed.
he phones her:
“I want my drill back.
have it ready.
I’ll pick the children up at
ten.”
when he arrives he waits outside
the door.
his children leave with
him.
she comes back to bed
and I stretch a leg out
place it against hers.
I was young once too.
human relationships simply aren’t
durable.
I think back to the women in
my life.
they seem non-existent.
“did he get his drill?” I ask.
“yes, he got his drill.”
I wonder if I’ll ever have to come
back for my bermuda
shorts and my record album
by The Academy of St. Martin in the
Fields? I suppose I
will.
she’s from Texas and weighs
103 pounds
and stands before the
mirror combing oceans
of reddish hair
which falls all the way down
her back to her ass.
the hair is magic and shoots
sparks as I lay on the bed
and watch her combing her
hair. she’s like something
out of the movies but she’s
actually here. we make love
at least once a day and
she can make me laugh
any time she cares
to. Texas women are always
healthy, and besides that she’s
cleaned my refrigerator, my sink,
the bathroom, and she cooks and
feeds me healthy foods
and washes the dishes
too.
“Hank,” she told me,
holding up a can of grapefruit
juice, “this is the best of them
all.”
it says: Texas unsweetened
PINK grapefruit juice.
she looks like Katherine Hepburn
looked when she was
in high school, and I watch those
103 pounds
combing a yard and some change
of reddish hair
before the mirror
and I feel her inside of my
wrists and at the backs of my eyes,
and the toes and legs and belly
of me feel her and
the other part too,
and all of Los Angeles falls down
and weeps for joy,
the walls of the love parlors shake—
the ocean rushes in and she turns
to me and says, “damn this hair!”
and I say,
“yes.”
then there was the time in
New Orleans
I was living with a fat woman,
Marie, in the French Quarter
and I got very sick.
while she was at work
I got down on my knees
in the kitchen
that afternoon and
prayed. I was not a
religious man
but it was a very dark afternoon
and I prayed:
“Dear God: if you will let me live,
I promise You I’ll never take
another drink.”
I kneeled there and it was just like
a movie—
as I finished praying
the clouds parted and the sun came
through the curtains
and fell upon me.
then I got up and took a crap.
there was a big spider in Marie’s bathroom
but I crapped anyhow.
an hour later I began feeling much
better. I took a walk around the Quarter
and smiled at people.
I stopped at the grocery and got a couple of
6 packs for Marie.
I began feeling so good that an hour later
I sat in the kitchen and opened
one of the beers.
I drank that and then another one
and then I went in and
killed the spider.
when Marie got home from work
I gave her a big kiss,
then sat in the kitchen and talked
as she cooked dinner.
she asked me what had happened that day
and I told her I had killed the
spider. she didn’t get
angry. she was a good
sort.
I tried it standing up
this time.
it doesn’t usually
work.
this time it seemed
to…
she kept saying
“o my God, you’ve got
beautiful legs!”
it was all right
until she took her feet
off the ground
and wrapped her legs
around my middle.
“o my God, you’ve got
beautiful legs!”
she weighed about 138
pounds and hung there as I
worked.
it was when I climaxed
that I felt the pain
fly straight up my
spine.
I dropped her on the
couch and walked around
the room.
the pain remained.
“look,” I told her,
“you better go. I’ve got
to develop some film
in my dark room.”
she dressed and left
and I walked into the
kitchen for a glass of
water. I got a glass full
in my left hand.
the pain ran up behind my
ears and
I dropped the glass
which broke on the floor.
I got into a tub full of
hot water and epsom salts.
I just got stretched out
when the phone rang.
as I tried to straighten
my back
the pain extended to my
neck and arms.
I flopped about
gripped the sides of the tub
got out
with shots of green and yellow
and red light
flashing in my head.
the phone kept ringing.
I picked it up.
“hello?”
“I LOVE YOU!” she said.
“thanks,” I said.
“is that all you’ve got
to say?”
“yes.”
“eat shit!” she said and
hung up.
love dries up, I thought
as I walked back to the
bathroom, even faster
than sperm.
she writes: you’ll
be moaning and groaning
in your poems
about how I fucked
those 2 guys last week.
I know you.
she writes on to
say that my vibe
machine was right—
she had just fucked
a third guy
but she knows I don’t
want to hear who, why
or how. she closes her
letter, “Love.”
rats and roaches
have triumphed again.
here it comes running
with a slug in its
mouth, it’s singing
old love songs.
close the windows
moan
close the doors
groan.
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’s all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’m not jealous
because we’ve never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame—not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them
that
, and then awakensin the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ve told
us, but listening to you I wasn’t sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “print her, print her, she’s mad but she’s
magic. there’s no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’t happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’t help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.