Poem

my mail

keeps evolving and there is more
of it.
in the old days
many letters were from ladies,
often with photos.
I'd tell them to come visit
and I met them at the airport
and drove them
home.
then there was drinking and
sex.
most stayed two or three days,
then left.

there were also letters from
men in jail, some as far away as
Australia.
I answered these letters.
there were also letters from
poets, known and
unknown.
then there were a few mental
cases.
I answered these as well.
the problem was that they all
wanted continual
response,
a life-long correspondence.
when I would inform them
that this couldn't be done
I received some irrational
and foul responses
in return.

I found myself writing dozens
of letters a
month.
and my intention
as a writer had not been to
correspond with
any and
all.

I finally gave up
babying my
mailbox.

I read my mail but in
90 percent of the cases
I didn't
respond.

I heard a story about
Faulkner.
when he got a letter
he held it up to the
light.
if he didn't see a check
in there
he threw it away
unopened.

I read my mail
then threw it
away.

now much of my mail
is from college
professors.
some of them are
precise and pleasant
enough
but few are worthy
of response.

and there are a couple of
self-published books of poetry
a week,
few worthy of
response.

the ladies and the
convicts and the madmen
have dropped
away.

I still get letters from
people who announce they will
soon be in town to
"drink 8 or ten beers" with
me ...

my job
as a writer
is to write.
I am not a counselor
nor an entertainer,
nor am I interested in
reading books of
poesy
or bedding down
or giving blurbs
or recommending unsung
so-called geniuses
to my
publisher.

when I was an unknown
writer
I sent my work
directly to the magazines
and the publishers,
never with a cover
letter,
and I never knocked on
anybody's
door
and I never read my
work to my wives or
my girlfriends
or anybody.

when you are in a prize fight
you climb into the
ring,
you do it where it is
done.
and it's not done at
literary parties or by
writing Burroughs or
Mailer
or Ferlinghetti.

you sit down at your
machine
and fire it into the
unknown,
and if you don't have
a machine
you write it on the
walls or on the edges
of newspapers.
and you'll keep doing
it,
doing it,
and if you've got
it,
the guts and the
laughter and the manner
of saying it
you'll finally come
through.
forget everything
else.

the gods are good,
they only want to
make sure.

Charles Bukowski (1971), from Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems (1997)