_____________________________________________________________________________ ---------------------------- I Bleed for This? ------------------------------ ------04.07.96-----------------------------------------------------#054------ Drive Through Hell appreciated by IBFT by Charles Bukowski relentless as the tarantula --------------------------- they're not going to let you sit at a front table at some cafe in Europe in the mid-afternoon sun. if you do, somebody's going to drive by and spray your guts with a submachine gun. they're not going to let you feel good for very long anywhere. the forces aren't going to let you sit around fucking off and relaxing. you've got to do it their way. the unhappy, the bitter and the vengeful need their fix - which is you or somebody anybody in agony, or better yet dead, dropped into some hole. as long as there are human beings about there is never going to be any peace for any individual upon this earth (or anywhere else they might escape to) all you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes here or maybe an hour there. something is working toward you right now, and I mean you and nobody but you. gay paree --------- the cafes in Paris are just like you imagine they are: very well-dressed people, snobs, and the snob-waiter comes up and takes your order as if you were a leper. but after you get your wine you feel better you begin to feel like a snob yourself and you give the guy at the next table a sidelong glance he catches you and you twitch your nose a bit as if you had just smelled dogshit then you look away. and the food when it arrives is always too mild. the French are delicate with their spices. and as you eat and drink you realize that everybody is terrorized: too bad too bad such a lovely city full of cowards. then more wine brings more realization: Paris is the world and the world is Paris. drink to it and because of it. for the concerned: ------------------ if you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete. a large portion of my readers want me to keep writing about bedding down with madwomen and streetwalkers- also, about being in jails and hospitals, or starving or puking my guts out. I agree that complacency hardly engenders an immortal literature but neither does repetition. for those readers now sick at heart believing that I'm a contented man- cheer: agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody. drive through hell ------------------ the people are weary, unhappy and frustrated, the people are bitter and vengeful, the people are deluded and fearful, the people are angry and uninventive and I drive among them on the freeway and they project what is left of themselves in their manner of driving- some more hateful, more thwarted than others- some don't like to be passed, some attempt to keep others from passing --some attempt to block lane changes --some hate cars of a newer, more expensive model --others in these cars hate the older cars. the freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions, it's humanity on the move, most of them coming from some place they hated and going to another they hate just as much or more. the freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths and collisions of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives. when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away. ============================================================================== IBFT: No matter how hard you laugh with or at it, you'll NEVER get it. http://www.amherst.edu/~mcspinks/ibft/ibfthome.html email: mcspinks@unix.amherst.edu ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/IBFT The Eleventh Hour (617)696-3146 ==============================================================================