the weather is hot on the back of my watch

which is down at Finkelstein’s

who is gifted with 3 balls

but no heart, but you’ve got to understand

when the bull goes down

on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else,

and let’s not over-rate the obvious decency

for in a crap game you may be cutting down

some wobbly king of 6 kids

and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check,

and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn?

not I, Henry,

and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes,

maybe you should have stuck it into something else

like an oil well

or a herd of cows.

I’m too old to argue,

I’ve gone with the poem

and been k.o.’d with the old sucker-punch

round after round,

but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser

or any other fool full of medals and nothing else,

or the first time we read Dos

or Eliot with his trousers rolled;

the weather is hot on the back of my watch

which is down at Finkelstein’s,

but you know what they say: things are tough all over,

and I remember once on the bum in Texas

I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns

jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate

and the crows came down half-dead, half-living,

and they clubbed them to death to save their shells

but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows

and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and

stuck out their tongues

and mourned their dead and elected new leaders

and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap.

you can only kill what shouldn’t be there.

and Finkelstein should be there and my watch

and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad

they are supposed to be bad and if they are good

they are likewise supposed to be—although there is a minor

fight to be fought,

but still I am sad

because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands,

way off course, not even wanting to be there,

two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me

and asked me what time it was

and I wouldn’t tell him,

and later they gathered them up for burning

as if they were no better than dung with feathers,

feathers and a little gasoline,

and from the bottom of one pile

a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me.

it was 4:35 p.m.

Copyright Credit: “the weather is hot on the back of my watch" from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1974 by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (Black Sparrow Press, 1996)