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Charles Bukowski - The Weather Is Hot On The Back Of My Watch
Work rating: Medium

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.
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