BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #4 ("we ain't got no money, honey, but we got rain" by Charles Bukowski)

It is difficult to pinpoint one Charles Bukowski poem for this project. Not only because he wrote so many great poems, but because I have featured Bukowski poems on BillyBlog before, like “The Mockingbird,” which I would say is my favorite and “Dinosauria, We," which runs a close second.

So I settled on a poem whose title I evoke when a) it’s raining and/or b) money is tight. It’s one of the longer Bukowski poems (the audio at the end runs to eight minutes), but it’s one I recall often. So, pull up a chair and take a look and/or listen. This poem does what good poems do: it transports you to another time, and another place. Anyone who has lived through a long rain in Los Angeles can probably relate. There's an audio link at the end, as well:

we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain

call it the greenhouse effect or whatever

but it just doesn't rain like it

used to.

I particularly remember the rains of the 

depression era.

there wasn't any money but there was

plenty of rain.

it wouldn't rain for just a night or

a day,

it would RAIN for 7 days and 7

nights

and in Los Angeles the storm drains

weren't built to carry off taht much

water

and the rain came down THICK and 

MEAN and

STEADY

and you HEARD it banging against

the roofs and into the ground

waterfalls of it came down

from roofs

and there was HAIL

big ROCKS OF ICE

bombing

exploding smashing into things

and the rain 

just wouldn't

STOP

and all the roofs leaked-

dishpans,

cooking pots

were placed all about;

they dripped loudly

and had to be emptied

again and

again.

the rain came up over the street curbings,

across the lawns, climbed up the steps and

entered the houses.

there were mops and bathroom towels,

and the rain often came up through the 

toilets:bubbling, brown, crazy,whirling,

and all the old cars stood in the streets,

cars that had problems starting on a 

sunny day,

and the jobless men stood

looking out the windows

at the old machines dying

like living things

out there.

the jobless men,

failures in a failing time

were imprisoned in their houses with their

wives and children

and their

pets.

the pets refused to go out

and left their waste in 

strange places.

the jobless men went mad 

confined with

their once beautiful wives.

there were terrible arguments

as notices of foreclosure

fell into the mailbox.

rain and hail, cans of beans,

bread without butter; fried

eggs, boiled eggs, poached

eggs; peanut butter

sandwiches, and an invisible 

chicken 

in every pot.

my father, never a good man

at best, beat my mother

when it rained

as I threw myself

between them,

the legs, the knees, the

screams

until they

separated.

"I'll kill you," I screamed

at him. "You hit her again

and I'll kill you!"

"Get that son-of-a-bitching

kid out of here!"

"no, Henry, you stay with

your mother!"

all the households were under 

siege but I believe that ours

held more terror than the

average.

and at night

as we attempted to sleep

the rains still came down

and it was in bed

in the dark

watching the moon against 

the scarred window

so bravely

holding out 

most of the rain,

I thought of Noah and the

Ark

and I thought, it has come

again.

we all thought

that.

and then, at once, it would 

stop.

and it always seemed to 

stop

around 5 or 6 a.m.,

peaceful then,

but not an exact silence

because things continued to

drip

  drip

    drip

and there was no smog then

and by 8 a.m.

there was a

blazing yellow sunlight,

Van Gogh yellow-

crazy, blinding!

and then

the roof drains

relieved of the rush of 

water

began to expand in the warmth:

PANG!PANG!PANG!

and everybody got up and looked outside

and there were all the lawns

still soaked

greener than green will ever

be

and there were birds

on the lawn

CHIRPING like mad,

they hadn't eaten decently 

for 7 days and 7 nights

and they were weary of 

berries

and

they waited as the worms

rose to the top,

half drowned worms.

the birds plucked them 

up

and gobbled them

down;there were

blackbirds and sparrows.

the blackbirds tried to

drive the sparrows off

but the sparrows,

maddened with hunger,

smaller and quicker,

got their

due.

the men stood on their porches

smoking cigarettes,

now knowing

they'd have to go out

there

to look for that job

that probably wasn't 

there, to start that car 

that probably wouldn't

start.

and the once beautiful

wives

stood in their bathrooms

combing their hair,

applying makeup,

trying to put their world back

together again,

trying to forget that

awful sadness that

gripped them,

wondering what they could

fix for 

breakfast.

and on the radio

we were told that

school was now

open.

and

soon

there I was

on the way to school,

massive puddles in the 

street,

the sun like a new

world,

my parents back in that

house,

I arrived at my classroom

on time.

Mrs. Sorenson greeted us

with, "we won't have our

usual recess, the grounds 

are too wet."

"AW!" most of the boys 

went.

"but we are going to do

something special at

recess," she went on,

"and it will be

fun!"

well, we all wondered

what that would

be

and the two hour wait

seemed a long time

as Mrs. Sorenson

went about

teaching her

lessons.

I looked at the little

girls, they looked so 

pretty and clean and

alert,

they sat still and

straight

and their hair was 

beautiful

in the California

sunshine.

then the recess bells rang 

and we all waited for the 

fun.

then Mrs. Sorenson told 

us:

"now, what we are going to

do is we are going to tell

each other what we did 

during the rainstorm!

we'll begin in the front row

and go right around!

now, Michael, you're 

first!. . ."

well, we all began to tell

our stories, Michael began

and it went on and on,

and soon we realized that

we were all lying, not

exactly lying but mostly

lying and some of the boys

began to snicker and some 

of the girls began to give

them dirty looks and

Mrs. Sorenson said,

"all right! I demand a

modicum of silence

here!

I am interested in what

you did

during the rainstorm

even if you

aren't!"

so we had to tell our 

stories and they were

stories.

one girl said that

when the rainbow first

came 

she saw God's face

at the end of it.

only she didn't say

which end.

one boy said he stuck

his fishing pole

out the window

and caught a little

fish

and fed it to his

cat.

almost everybody told

a lie.

the truth was just

too awful and

embarrassing to 

tell.

then the bell rang

and recess was 

over.

"thank you," said Mrs.

Sorenson, "that was very

nice.

and tomorrow the grounds 

will be dry

and we will put them

to use

again."

most of the boys

cheered

and the little girls 

sat very straight and

still,

looking so pretty and 

clean and

alert,

their hair beautiful in a sunshine that 

the world might never see 

again.

If you made it this far, you may want to hear Buk reading it, too:

we ain't got no money, honey, but we got rain (m4a) - Charles Bukowski

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#5 - "Garbage" by A.R. Ammons
#6 - "Rock and Hawk" by Robinson Jeffers
#7 - "Nostalgia" by Billy Collins
#8 - "A Piece of the Storm" by Mark Strand
#9A - "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché and
#9B - "may i feel said he" by e.e.cummings
#10 - "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell
#11 - "Symposium" by Paul Muldoon
#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok

Graffiti of the Day - Updated!

This is from the corner of 5th Avenue and 87th Street in Bay Ridge. And no measly-peasly scribbling here. This is top-notch sloganeering:


Photo taken Saturday, March 22, 2008

UPDATED!

How weird is this...I found the source. Ok, not so weird. Anyone with Google could have pointed this out:

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

And the originator of this quote?

None other than Charles Bukowski.

Why Don’t I Love Bukowski Anymore?

This is a soul-searching post. I started writing it on February 26, 2008. I’m aiming to finish it by March 9, the 14th anniversary of the death of Charles Bukowski.


I first became truly aware of Bukowski in 1987, when writing for the Arts pages of the Occidental newspaper. My editor sent me to the Beverly Center in L.A. to see a Belgian film called Love is a Dog From Hell. The film has survived as Crazy Love. It was based, in part, on a Bukowski short story called “The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California," and some biographical aspects of the writer.

I knew nothing of Bukowski prior to seeing the film, but I bought the volume of poetry Love is a Dog From Hell shortly thereafter. His poetry to me was startling, exciting, brilliant and decidedly un-academic. I became a huge fan, buying everything I could and reading it.

Bukowski died in 1994. I still recall the moment I heard the news: it was a cold dark March morning in Saugus, California. My next-door neighbor downstairs and I were driving to the Metrolink station in Valencia. The Northridge quake less than 2 months earlier had made carpooling to my job in Pasadena impossible. The radio was on and the newsman announced that Bukowski had died.

That day, I special-ordered his soon-to-be-published novel Pulp from Vroman’s Bookstore. When it arrived, it was a signed copy. I laminated Bukowski’s obit from the L.A. Times Book Review and it’s still behind my door in my office today. He was a major influence on my own poetry.

I was thrilled to hear that there was enough unpublished work to last into the 21st Century. But somewhere in the late ‘90s, early ‘00s, I stopped enjoying Hank. I bought his new books. I sighed when John Martin sold Black Sparrow Press and the Bukowski catalog went to HarperCollins/Ecco. I did go see Factotum in the theaters when it came out in 2006, and I appreciated it. But I have been selling off my Bukowski on eBay. He is still as popular as ever, but I am holding on to a few items, and that is it.


This piece was prompted by my most recent attempt to read some "new" Bukowski. I grabbed The People Look Like Flowers at Last: New Poems (Ecco: 2007) from the library. This is supposedly his final posthumous book of unreleased work. I got about a dozen poems in and gave up. I was bored. The Bukowski Formula was diluted by repeated applications. He wrote so much, so often repeating anecdotes in various forms, that there was nothing new and exciting about him to me. It makes me sad.

Then, more recently, I grabbed at the NYPL, The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (L.A. Times review here). A greatest hits, if you will.







It opens with “the mockingbird,” one of my favorite poems, ever. Not just by Bukowski, but by anyone. I still remember reading it for the first time and putting five stars next to it in the table of contents. Here it is again:

the mockingbird

the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn't understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman's legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.

summer was over.

I still get chills from that one.

So I decided to read this “greatest hits” collection. And I am going to keep this document open and add thoughts to it as I read. This will likely by a lengthy post, but it will serve as a tribute to the man who many revere as a great poet, who others dismiss as a crude drunk with a typewriter.

Five poems later, there is a revelation. “dark night poem” is listed as “uncollected”. In the manner of a band’s “Greatest Hits” compilations, we get something new. This could be good, this could be bad. I don’t want to comment on each and every poem. Some have come from the posthumous poems that left me empty. Others I recognize. Poem number 6 is another “famous” one. “The Last Days of the Suicide Kid”. Oh, the glory that is YouTube:



Of course, it takes no time (page 28) to find a great Bukowski poem (in my opinion) from the posthumous volumes. “Eulogy” from The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps; New Poems (2001) speaks to me, as it probably does to anyone who has had a loyal, faithful car that has lived a long life and then, finally, died forever:

you then had to watch it carted
away
hanging there
from the back of the tow truck
wheeled off
as if it had no
soul

I wish I could link the whole poem because it is so dead on perfect.

A couple days later and I have been more selective of what I choose to praise. When I was going through the Bukowski oeuvre in the Nineties, reading everything, whenever I came across a quote I liked, a snippet of mad verse, a couplet of particular brilliance, a scribbled it on the inside cover of my journal. During that time I filled many inside covers with Bukowskian madness. On page 86, in the poem “the angel who pushed his wheelchair,” from What Matters Most is How Well You Walk through the Fire, I came across a great snippet: “all the poets wanted to get disability insurance/it was better than immortality”.

Flashing forward to March 5, and I realize the March 9 deadline is rapidly approaching, and my ambitions to finish the 548 pages of poetry may have been ambitious. Although, I am on page 126.

Now Friday, and I am plodding away, occasionally picking up the book and reading a poem or two in between banal chores. And here, we have a gem, buried in the brilliance: a sapphire that outshines the glowing stones around it, one of Buk’s best, on page 159, “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” really worth re-printing in full:

the tragedy of the leaves

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady's note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, andcient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that's the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world has failed us
both.

A few pages later, another fine Bukowski moment, “The Genius of the Crowd”



Another uncollected poem (“I am eaten by butterflies”) on page 182 ends with this statement: “my poems are only bits of scratchings/on the floor of a/cage”. There is a beautiful, sad subtlety here, his poems are not merely insignificant scratchings, but bits of scratchings.

"an empire of coins," from Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories, has a couple more great bits that I remember from when I first read them. Bukowski is often mislabeled as a misogynist, in my opinion. He may use crude names to describe women, but he is an equal opportunity offender. It is generally the vast majority of humans that he disdains. In lines like these, he uses a crude description to mask his admiration of the power of the female:

a woman's a woman, I say, and I put my binoculars between her

kneecaps and I can see where

empires have fallen

and he later proclaims:

the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,

study it and out it to sleep in the abstract.

is there anything less abstract

than dying day by day?

Well, it is March 9, and I only got through 250 pages.

If you look back at the top of the post at the photo of Bukowski's grave marker, you can see what is written there: "Don't Try". Perhaps I should have heeded that advice.

I do intend to finish the post at a later date, but I'm throwing it out there today, the anniversary of his passing. I never got to page 520, where one finds one of my favorite Bukowski poems, "Dinosauria, we." We'll end here with this:

National Poetry Month Just Around the Corner - How About a Little Bukowski?

The good folks at HarperCollins sent me an email alerting me to yet another posthumous collection of poetry from Charles Bukowski, dead 13 years now, and still churning 'em out. Behold: The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems



This is, by my estimate, the 25th book published since Hank left us. And there's another volume coming in November.

Whet your appetite from this latest edition:

for they had things to say

the canaries were there, and the lemon tree
and the old woman with warts;
and I was there, a child
and I touched the piano keys
as they talked—
but not too loudly
for they had things to say,
the three of them;
and I watched them cover the canaries at night
with flour sacks:
"so they can sleep, my dear."

I played the piano quietly
one note at a time,
the canaries under their sacks,
and there were pepper trees,
pepper trees brushing the roof like rain
and hanging outside the windows
like green rain,
and they talked, the three of them
sitting in a warm night's semicircle,
and the keys were black and white
and responded to my fingers
like the locked-in magic
of a waiting, grown-up world;
and now they're gone, the three of them
and I am old:
pirate feet have trod
the clean-thatched floors
of my soul,
and the canaries sing no more.

For more Bukowski, visit this website.