Screams From the Balcony Read Online Free PDF

money…talent, a good singing voice, a left hook deep to the gut…send her a copy, she hung up on me, last time I phoned her drunk, giving evidence of need, she hung up on me…
    then there’s this girl in Sacramento who writes me these little letters…very depressed bitch, mixed like quite some waffle flower, making gentle intellectual overtures which I ignore, but send her a magazine
    in lieu of a hot poker.
    that makes 4?
    I hope to send you some more poems anytime because I got to figure that people who run my poems are a little mad, but that’s all right. I am also that way. anyhow,—
    I hope meanwhile you do not fold up before I do.
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    A note by the recipient identifies this as accompanied by the gift of a bobby pin. The “her” in question is presumably Jane Cooney Baker, who had died early in 1962. For Bukowski’s relationship with her, see Hank, chapters 4 and 5 .
     
     
    [To Ann Bauman]
    [September 1962]
     
    Death does not take everything, god damn it.
    I hope you can use this in your hair to keep alive a something that I should have died in front of. o my god my god yes I am drinking. and who cares? I love her. simple swine words. use it, in your hair. Thank you, Sacramento fog, fountains, odd voice, grief of wretched breathing, phantom love, oh child, wear it in your hair, honor me, her, the mountains, the hot great tongue and flash of God.
    Thank you.
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    [To Ann Bauman]
    September 4, 1962
     
    Disregard my last letter. Strings became undone. A little sawdust spilled out. Beer. Wine. German gloom. These things can fetch anyone. A waterglass looks like a skull. Horses run into the rail. Insomnia. Job trouble. Toothache. The body bleeds. Retching. Flat tire. Traffic ticket. Lack of love. Sleep, then nightmare. Paper everywhere. Trivial bits of paper. Nothing ever done. Flooded sink. People in the hall with cardboard faces. Sure, sure, sure.
    Today I will walk in the sun. I will simply walk in the sun. [* * *]
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    [To Jon Webb]
    September 4, 1962
     
    Regarding the death of my woman last Jan. 22, there is not much to say except I will never be the same again. I might attempt to write it sometimes but it is still too close, may always be too close. But that time in the charity ward years ago a little Mexican girl who changed the sheets told me that she was going to shack up with me as soon as I got well, and I began feeling better right away. I had one visitor: a drunken woman, red and puffy-faced, a bedmate of the past who reeled against the bed a few times, said nothing and walked out. Six days later I was driving a truck, lifting 50-lb packages and wondering if the blood would come again. A couple of days later I had the first drink, the one they said would kill me. A week or so later I got a typewriter, and after a ten-year blank, after selling to Story & others, I found my fingers making the poem. Or rather the bar-talk. The non-lyrical, non-singing thing. The rejects came quickly enough. But they made no indentation, for I felt in each line as if I were talking the thing out. Not for them, but for myself. Now I can read very little other poetry or very little other anything. Anyway, the drunk lady who reeled against my bed, I buried her last Jan. 22. And I never did see my little Mexican girl. I saw others, but somehow she would have been right. Today, I am alone, almost outside all of them: the buttocks, the breasts, the clean live dresses like unused and new dishtowels on the rack. But don’t get me wrong—I’m still 6 feet tall with 200 lbs. of ableness, but I was able best with the one that’s gone.
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    Bukowski’s “WW 2” appeared in Mica 7 (November 1962). Previously, three poems were published in Mica 5 (Winter 1962). The magazine was edited by Helmut Bonheim and Raymond Federman from Santa Barbara .
     
     
    [To Helmut Bonheim]
    September 28, [1962]
     
    Thanks the stamps, and good you like “WW 2” which is more factual than inventive, but what the fuck,