sometimes I think the gods deliberately keep pushing me into the fire just to hear me yelp a few good lines. they just aren't going to let me retire silk scarf about neck giving lectures at Yale. the gods need me to entertain them. they must be terribly bored with all the others and I am too. and now my cigarette lighter has gone dry. I sit here hopelessly flicking it. this kind of fire they can't give me.
From The Continual Condtion by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 2009 by Linda Lee Bukowski. Used by permission of Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
sometimes I think the gods deliberately keep pushing me into the fire just to hear me yelp a few good lines. they just aren't going to let me retire silk scarf about neck giving lectures at Yale. the gods need me to entertain them. they must be terribly bored with all the others and I am too. and now my cigarette lighter has gone dry. I sit here hopelessly flicking it. this kind of fire they can't give me.
From The Continual Condtion by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 2009 by Linda Lee Bukowski. Used by permission of Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
From The Language of Spring, edited by Robert Atwan, published by Beacon Press, 2003.