Long walks at night-- that's what good for the soul: peeking into windows watching tired housewives trying to fight off their beer-maddened husbands.   By Charles Bukowski

Sundays too my father got up earlyAnd put his clothes on in the blueback cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I'd wa

1O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won; The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the stea

What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry upLike a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a sore--And then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?Or crust and sugar over--like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sa

Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory --Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the beloved's bed;And so thy

A Wounded Deer -- leaps highest --I've heard the Hunter tell --'Tis but the Ecstasy of death --And then the Brake is still!The Smitten Rock that gushes!The trampled Steel that springs!A Cheek is alway

Under the harvest moon,When the soft silverDrips shimmeringOver the garden nights,Death, the gray mocker,Comes and whispers to youAs a beautiful friendWho remembers.Under the summer rosesWhen the flag

Take this kiss upon the brow!And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow--You are not wrong, who deemThat my days have been a dream;Yet if hope has flown awayIn a night, or in a day,In a vision

The grey sea and the long black land;And the yellow half-moon large and low;And the startled little waves that leapIn fiery ringlets from their sleep,As I gain the cove with pushing prow,And quench it

Out through the fields and the woodsAnd over the walls I have wended;I have climbed the hills of viewAnd looked at the world and descended;I have come by the highway home,And lo, it is ended.The leave

Love is enough: though the world be a-waning,And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,Though the skies be too dark for dim eyes to discoverThe gold-cups and daisies fair blooming there

TIme and again, however well we know the landscape of love,and the little church-yard with lamenting names,and the frightfully silent ravine wherein all the othersend: time and again we go out two tog

Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have: Max,

Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale, He ate his egg with a ladle in a egg-cup big as a pail, And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and fish he took was Whale, But they all

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch

Everyone grumbled. The sky was grey.We had nothing to do and nothing to say.We were nearing the end of a dismal day,And then there seemed to be nothing beyond,Then Daddy fell into the pond!And everyon

A noiseless patient spider,I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,Ever unreeli

Starting to feel invincible,picked up a new car at the local lot,headed out to the bar to celebrate,had a few drinks,setup as bait by the local pd,pulled out the lot to be decisphored,making a quick t

Unfunny uncles who insistin trying on a lady's hat,--oh, even if the joke falls flat,we share your slight transvestite twistin spite of our embarrassment.Costume and custom are complex.The headgear of

I Came to buy a smile today But just a single smile The smallest one upon your face Will suit me just as well The one that no one else would miss It shone so very small I'm pleading at the "counte