An old man asked me for a cigarette

and I carefully dealt out two.

“Been lookin’ for job. Gonna stand

in the sun and smoke.”

He was close to rags and rage

and he leaned against death.

It was a cold day, indeed, and trucks

loaded and heavy as old whores

banged and tangled on the streets…

We drop like planks from a rotting floor

as the world strives to unlock the bone

that weights its brain.

(God is a lonely place without steak.)

We are dying birds

we are sinking ships-

the world rocks against us

and we

throw out our arms

and we

throw out our legs

like the death kiss of the centipede

but they kindly snap our backs

and call our poison “politics.”

We, we smoked, he and I- little men

nibbling fish-head thoughts…

All the horses do not come in,

and as you watch the lights of the jails

and the hospitals wink on and out,

and men handle flags as carefully as babies

remember this:

you are a great-gutted instrument of

heart and belly, carefully planned-

so if you take a plane for Savannah,

take the best plane;

or if you eat chicken on a rock,

make it a very special animal.

(You call it a bird; I call birds

flowers.)

And it you decided to kill somebody,

make it anybody and not somebody:

some men are made of more special, precious

parts: do not kill

if you will

a president of a King

or a man

behind a desk-

these have heavenly longitudes

enlightened attitudes.

If you decide,

take us

who stand and smoke and glower;

we are rusty with sadness and

feverish

with climbing broken ladders.

Take us:

we were never children

like your children.

We do not understand love songs

like your inamorata.

Our faces are cracked linoleum,

cracked through with the heavy, sure

feet of our masters.

We are shot through with carrot tops

and poppyseed and tilted grammar;

we waste days like mad black birds

and prat for alcoholic nights.

Our silk-sick human smiles wrap around

us like somebody else’s confetti:

we do not even belong to the Party.

We are a scene chalked-out with the

sick white brush of Age.

We smoke, asleep as a dish of figs.

We smoke, dead as a fog.

Take us.

A bathtub murder

or something quick and bright: our names

in the papers.

Known, as last, for a moment

to millions of careless and grape-dull eyes

that hold themselves private

to only flicker and flame

at the poor cracker-barrel jibes

of their conceited, pampered correct comedians.

Know, at last, for a moment,

as they will be known.

and as you will be known

by an all-gray man on an all-gray horse

who sits and fondles a sword

longer than the night

longer than the mountain’s aching backbone

longer than all the cries

that have a-bombed up out of throats

and exploded in a newer, less planned

land.

We smoke and the clouds do not notice us.

A cat walks by and shakes Shakespeare off of his back.

Tallow, tallow, candle like wax: our spines

are limp and our consciousness burns

guilelessly away

the remaining wick life has

doled out to us.

An old man asked me for a cigarette

and told me his troubles

and this

is what he said:

that Age was a crime

and that Pity picked up the marbles

and that Hatred picked up the

cash.

He might have been your father

or mine.

He might have been a sex-fiend

or a saint.

But whatever he was,

he was condemned

and we stood in the sun and

smoked

and looked around

in our leisure

to see who was next in line.

-Charles Bukowski