Favorite line from Buk? (1 Viewer)

My whole day and evening had been eaten away uselessly for a pittance, for the barest of a survival, never enough money to escape, let alone endure.
Slavery had not been abolished, it had been extended and enhanced to include the black and the white and any other usable color.
("About Aftermath")
 
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I was drunk and they
got me out of my car
put the bracelets on
and made me lay down
on the roadway
in the rain.
...
the water soaked
into my clothing.
I looked up
at the moon through
the raindrops,
thinking,
here I am
62 years old
and being
protected
from myself
again.

(from The Star)
 
I don't know about a favourite line, but,

"and all they know is kill, these pungent insects" (pg.147 of Days)

is a line that has often popped into my head, for some reason or another, over the years. And,

"a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor"

from the wonderfully titled, i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody's wife (pg.108 of Burning), is a line that could be applied to any number of young men bent on destruction.
 
I got so many favorites, but I was reading some poems today and encountered this one from "a future congressman" referring to the kid who lied about not having his dad's racing program when he had in fact put it in the toilet;

that boy was ready
for his life to come,
he would undoubtedly
be highly successful,
the lying little
prick.
 
It is sad to imagine that some who arrived latterly to Bukowski would know his oeuvre through the posthumous collections.
 
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I found it in a PDF file of Pleasures of the Damned.

Edit: Went back to the first few pages and saw "Edited by John Martin". My bad. :afb: Guess I'll be steering clear of that collection too.
 
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...there are many [philosophers] I read who I have forgotten,
perhaps properly so, but I remember one fellow who wrote an
entire book in which he proved that the moon was not there
and he did it so well that afterwards you thought, he's
absolutely right, the moon is not there.

how the hell is a young man going to deign to work an
8 hour day when the moon isn't even there?
what else
might be missing?

(from days like razors, nights full of rats)
 
"Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning, and you have the heaven they are looking for."

"People are pointless."

"Nature is not normal."

"Pain is absurd, because it exists."

"The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it — basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them."
 
...
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.

dead the rivers of our lives,
hearts like rocks.

pour the red blood of wine.
curse, complain, wail, sing
in that cheap hotel room
...
(from The Glory Days, written in 1990)
 
shoes

...

I do not understand myself,
she sends me photographs of the hospital
taken from the air
but I remember her on other nights,
not dying,
shoes with spikes like daggers
sitting next to mine;
how these strong nights become quite finally
my shoes in the closet
flown over by coats and awkard shirts,
and I look into the hole the
door leaves
and the walls, and I do not
write.


On Love.
 
one more drink and the desire to fuck
something,
a desire to be loved for the lie
and the trick
and a face without a
face

(While Sitting in a Bar on Sunset Boulevard)
 
i read through all six pages of this thread... and again i will state the following line as one of my top, if not favorite lines:

"i was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead."
 
Interesting to note that line was used twice in the oeuvre, as a line in the poem Consummation of Grief (Mockingbird) and as the title for some disparate pieces (Crucifix, Roominghouse).
 
then there was a knock on the
door and there was Monzo the
poet and his wife
Denise. Denise hated me with
a hatred
that was much more powerful than
Monzo‘s poems.

(from Rape)
 
A poem with a nice rhythm: A killer gets ready (Play The Piano...)
The narrator, Bukowski, met a marine in a train but I didn't like him
Towards the end:

he got off at Pasadena
vainer than any woman
he got off at Pasadena
proud and
dead
 
"When the wine ran out the depression, the fear, the uselessness of going on became too much and I knew I was going to do it."

(was one of my favorites since age 17)
 

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