Millionaires by Charles Bukowski

you

no faces

at all

laughing at nothing—

let me tell you

I have drunk in skid row rooms with

imbecile winos

whose cause was better

whose eyes still held some light

whose voices retained some sensibility,

and when the morning came

we were sick but not ill,

poor but not deluded,

and we stretched in our beds and rose

in the late afternoons

like millionaires.

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A new collection of Bukowski’s poems, The Pleasures of the Damned, was published on 14^th January, along with the re-publication of Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes, both from Canongate.

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Germany and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry when he was thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, at the age of seventy-three.