Читать книгу Come On In! - Charles Bukowski - Страница 11

hunched over this white sheet of paper

at 4 in the afternoon. I

received a letter from a young poet this morning

informing me that I was one of the most

important writers of the last

200 years.

well, now, one can’t believe that

especially if one has felt as I have

this past month,

walking about,

thinking,

surely I am going crazy,

and then thinking,

I can’t write

anymore.

and then I remember the factories,

the production lines,

the warehouses,

the time clocks,

overtime and layoffs

and flirtations with the Mexican girls

on the assembly line;

each day everything was carefully planned,

there was always something to do,

there was more than enough to do,

and if you didn’t keep up,

if you weren’t clever and swift and

obedient

you were out with the sparrows and

the bums.

writing’s different, you’re floating out there in the

white air, you’re hanging from the high-wire,

you’re sitting up in a tree and they’re working at

the trunk with a power

saw …

there’s no silk scarf about one’s neck,

no English accent,

no remittance checks from aristocratic ladies in Europe

with blind and impotent

husbands.

it’s more like a fast hockey game

or putting on the gloves with a man

50 pounds heavier and ten years

younger, or

it’s like steering a ship through the fog

with a mad damsel clinging to your

neck

and all along you know you’ve gotten away

with some quite obvious stuff, that

you’ve been given undeserved credit, for stuff

that you either wrote offhand or

hardly meant or hardly cared

about.

well, it helps to be

lucky.

yet, on the other hand, you have sometimes

done it as you always knew it should

be done, and you knew then that it was

as good as it could be done,

and that maybe you had done it better,

in a way,

than anybody else had done it for a long time

and

you allowed yourself to feel

good about that

for a moment or

two.

they put the pressure on you

with statements about 200 years,

and when only one individual says it, that’s all

right

but when 2 or 3 or 4 say it—

that’s when they tend to open the door to a

kookoo bin.

they tell you to give up cigarettes and

booze, and then they tell you that you

have 25 more good years ahead of you and

then

perhaps ten more years to enjoy your old

age

as you suck on

the rewards and

memories.

Patchen’s gone, we need you, man,

we all need you for that

good feeling just above the

belly button—

knowing that you are there in some small room in

northern California writing poems and

killing flies with a torn

flyswatter.

they can kill you,

the praisers can kill you,

the young girls can kill you,

as the blue-eyed boys in English depts.

who send warm letters

handwritten

on lined paper

can kill you,

and they’re all correct:

2 packs a day and the bottle

can kill you

too.

of course,

anything can kill you

and something eventually

will. all I can say is that

today

I have just inserted a new

typewriter ribbon

into this old machine

and I am pleased with the way it

works and that makes for more than just an

ordinary day, thank

you.