Daniela Smith

“you've got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sidewise
for a while
and have your guts
scrambled by a
bully
and the demonic
ladies,
you've got to run
along the edge of
madness
teetering,
you've got to starve
like a winter
alleycat,
you've go to live
with the imbecility
of at least a dozen
cities,
then maybe
maybe
maybe
you might know
where you are
for a tiny
blinking
moment.”
― Charles Bukowski, Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems

“To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski