Читать книгу The Pleasures of the Damned - Charles Bukowski - Страница 19

the drowning

for five years I have been looking

across the way

at the side of a red apartment house.

there must be people in there

even love in there

whatever that means.

here blows a horn, there sounds a

piano, and yesterday’s newspapers are as

yellow as the grass.

five years.

a man can drown in five years,

while the red bricks

stand forever.

I hear sounds now like dancing in the

air

great bladders of blood are being loosed in

Mariposa Ave.

sweat drenches my temple like beads on a

cold beer can

as armies fight in my head.

I see a woman come out of the redbrick

apartment house.

she is fat and comfortable

the slow horse of her body moves

under a dress of pink carnations

playing tricks with my better sense

and now she is gone and

the bricks look back at me

the bricks with their

windows and the windows look at me

and a bird on a telephone wire looks

and I feel naked as I

try to forget all the good dead.

a band plays wildly

LOOKAWAY, LOOKAWAY,

DIXIELAND!

as they empty bladders of poison

and bags of oranges over Mariposa Ave.

and the cars run through them like poor snow

and my pink woman comes back and I

try to tell her

wait! wait!

don’t go back in there!

but she goes inside as

my bird flies away

and it is just

another hot evening in

Los Angeles:

some bricks, a mongoose or two, Chimera and

disbelief.

(uncollected)