Back Screams From the Balcony
Chapters (26)
  1. Cover
  2. CHARLES BUKOWSKI
  3. SCREAMS FROM THE BALCONY
  4. EDITED BY SEAMUS COONEY
  5. Contents
  6. EDITOR’S NOTE
  7. • 1958 •
  8. • 1959 •
  9. • 1960 •
  10. • 1961 •
  11. • 1962 •
  12. • 1963 •
  13. • 1964 •
  14. • 1965 •
  15. • 1966 •
  16. • 1967 •
  17. • 1968 •
  18. • 1969 •
  19. AFTERWORD
  20. SEARCHABLE TERMS
  21. Acknowledgments
  22. About the Author
  23. BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI AVAILABLE FROM ECCO
  24. Copyright
  25. About the Publisher
  26. About the Publisher

love has got to have another name; the people who use the word shouldn’t. love begins an inch at a time; in slogans or brandished across a universe, it doesn’t work. you’ll see. this is the failure of Communism—the theory is proper; there just aren’t enough human beings around to work it. people continue to shit upon themselves and scream for theory, when anywhere anyday anytime the smallest kindest touch falling like a raindrop can start the whole thing going. but it’s just not in them. and here I might make you angry—for I say it’s in me, I feel it running up and down my arms, like cool moonlight, I am ready to begin, but they continue to be nasty, to fall asleep across the body of my pain. so fuck it, finally, and fuck them—they want me on the cross and they won’t get it. I have the great secret that they do not have: you needn’t wait on death; you can call the day and the moment.

I am a loner, Blaz, and it’s too bad for you are one of the few men I could ever feel contact with, and it’s too bad I’m not in Illinois or you’re not in Chicago but poverty our few talents keep us apart otherwise I would slug it out on the front lawn with you after 50 beers and show you that 20 years difference in age is not a begging for a lack of guts. yet guts to go on living or guts to kill yourself—it’s the asshole same thing, and if you ever get word that I did it across the kitchen table, I’ll know that you knew and that the choice was clean, a clean sweep, a shit goodbye, and an asking for more nothing—just a changing of the same dirty drawers. all right? all right.

I think mostly of continents of men like ants going nowhere not wanting too much not caring, fucking stealing writing bad stuff eating and living bad stuff all the horrible kitchens of unliving women bringing us our badly cooked meals to our badly worked bodies until we go mad or until we go simple and believe that the whole thing makes sense.

the tooth is banging away, it will not give up. wait I know the place of an old cigar like a bragging beautiful white kitten in a toy box in heaven. I found it. reams of blue smoke across this kitchen. a ltter a letter to Blaaesake. blaz.

yes, I am drunk and terrible and the ladies come out of the church and I want to fuck them all it is Sunday and the ladies come out of the church and I want to make them come in their red and green and yellow dresses. my tooth is killing me yet the leaves of the plant outside this window say hello hello

but I want to make all the women come

and they walk past my window