A sickness? Charles Bukowski

yes, I'm a Romantic, overly sentimental,
something of a hero worshiper,
and I do
not apologize for this.
instead, I revere Hemingway,
at the end of his endurance,
sticking the
barrel of the gun into his trembling
mouth;
and I think
of Van Gogh slicing off part of his ear
for a whore
and then blasting
himself away in the
cornfield;
then there was Chatterton drinking rat
poison (an extremely painful way to die
even if you are a
plagiarist);
and Ezra Pound dragged through
the dusty streets of Italy in a cage
and later confined to a
madhouse;
Celine robbed, hooted at, tormented by
the French;
Fitzgerald who finally quit drinking only to drop dead
soon thereafter;
Mozart in a pauper's grave;
Beethoven deaf;
Bierce vanishing into the wastelands of Mexico;
Hart Crane leaping over the ship's rail and
into the propeller;
Tolstoy accepting Christ and giving all his
possessions the
poor;
T. Lautrec
with his short, deformed
body
and perfectly developed
spirit,
drawing everything he
saw
and more;
D.H. Lawrence
dying of TB
and preparing his own ship of death
while writing his
last
great poems;
Li Po
setting his poems
on fire
and sailing them down the
river;
Sherwood Anderson dying
of peritonitis
after swallowing a
toothpick
(he was at a party
driking
martinis
when
the olive went in,
toothpick and
all);
Socrates drinking
hemlock with a
smile;
Nietzsche gone mad;
De Quincey addicted to opium;
Dostoevski standing blindfolded before a
firing squad;
Hamsun eating his own
flesh;
Harry Crosby commiting
suicide hand in hand with his
whore;
Tchaikovsky trying to
evade his homosexuality
by marrying a female
opera star;
Henry Miller, in his old
age, obsessed with
young Oriental
girls;
John Dos Passos going
from fervent left-winger
to ultraconservative
Republican;
Aldous Huxley taking
visionary
drugs and
reaping imaginary riches;
Brahms in his youth,
working on ways
to build a powerful
body
because he felt that
the mind was not enough;
Villon barred from Paris,
not for his ideas
but rather because he was a thief;
Thomas Wolfe who felt he couldn't
go home again
until
he was
famous;
and Faulkner:
when he got his morning mail,
he'd hold the envelope up
to the light
and if couldn't see
a check in there
he'd throw it
away;
William Burroughs who shot and
killed his
wife
(he missed the apple
on her
head);
Norman Mailer knifing his
wife; no apple
involved;
Salinger not believing
the world was worth writing
for:
Jean Julius Christian Sibelius,
a proud and beautiful man
composer of powerful music
who after his 40th year
went into hiding and was seldom
seen
again;
nobody is sure who
Shakespeare
was;
nightlife killed Truman
Capote;
Allen Ginsberg becoming a
college
professor;
William Saroyan marrying the
same woman twice
(but
by then
he wasn't going anywhere
anyhow);
John Fante being sliced away
bit by bit
by the surgeon's knife
before my very
eyes;
Robinson Jeffers
(the proudest poet of them all)
writing
begging letters to those in power.