Free Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski Page A

the sheets which were as
    delicious as miracles and walks in the park,
    the hawk smiled daylight and nighttime,
    we rode past frogs and elephants
    past mines in mountains
    past cripples working ouija boards,
    she had toes on her feet
    I had toes on my feet
    we rode up and down and away
    around,
    it was sensible and pliable and holy
    and felt very good
    very very good,
    the red lights blinked
    the zepplin flew away
    the war ended,
    we stretched out then
    and looked at the ceiling
    a calm sea of a ceiling,
    it was all right,
    then we got back in the bathtub together
    and french kissed
    some more.
     

style
     
     
    style is the answer to everything—
    a fresh way to approach a dull or a
    dangerous thing.
    to do a dull thing with style
    is preferable to doing a dangerous thing
    without it.
     
 
    Joan of Arc had style
    John the Baptist
    Christ
    Socrates
    Caesar,
    Garcia Lorca.
     
 
    style is the difference,
    a way of doing,
    a way of being done.
     
 
    6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water
    or you walking out of the bathroom naked
    without seeing
    me.
     

the shower
     
     
    we like to shower afterwards
    (I like the water hotter than she)
    and her face is always soft and peaceful
    and she’ll wash me first
    spread the soap over my balls
    lift the balls
    squeeze them,
    then wash the cock:
    “hey, this thing is still hard!”
    then get all the hair down there,—
    the belly, the back, the neck, the legs,
    I grin grin grin,
    and then I wash her…
    first the cunt, I
    stand behind her, my cock in the cheeks of her ass
    I gently soap up the cunt hairs,
    wash there with a soothing motion,
    I linger perhaps longer than necessary,
    then I get the backs of the legs, the ass,
    the back, the neck, I turn her, kiss her,
    soap up the breasts, get them and the belly, the neck,
    the fronts of the legs, the ankles, the feet,
    and then the cunt, once more, for luck…
    another kiss, and she gets out first,
    toweling, sometimes singing while I stay in
    turn the water on hotter
    feeling the good times of love’s miracle
    I then get out…
    it is usually mid-afternoon and quiet,
    and getting dressed we talk about what else
    there might be to do,
    but being together solves most of it,
    in fact, solves all of it
    for as long as those things stay solved
    in the history of woman and
    man, it’s different for each
    better and worse for each—
    for me, it’s splendid enough to remember
    past the marching of armies
    and the horses that walk the streets outside
    past the memories of pain and defeat and unhappiness:
    Linda, you brought it to me,
    when you take it away
    do it slowly and easily
    make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in
    my life, amen.
     

if we take —
     
     
    if we take what we can see—
    the engines driving us mad,
    lovers finally hating;
    this fish in the market
    staring upward into our minds;
    flowers rotting, flies web-caught;
    riots, roars of caged lions,
    clowns in love with dollar bills,
    nations moving people like pawns;
    daylight thieves with beautiful
    nighttime wives and wines;
    the crowded jails,
    the commonplace unemployed,
    dying grass, 2-bit fires;
    men old enough to love the grave.
     
 
    These things, and others, in content
    show life swinging on a rotten axis.
     
 
    But they’ve left us a bit of music
    and a spiked show in the corner,
    a jigger of scotch, a blue necktie,
    a small volume of poems by Rimbaud,
    a horse running as if the devil were
    twisting his tail
    over bluegrass and screaming, and then,
    love again
    like a streetcar turning the corner
    on time,
    the city waiting,
    the wine and the flowers,
    the water walking across the lake
    and summer and winter and summer and summer
    and winter again.
     

About the Author
     
    CHARLES BUKOWSKI is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, and brought