Bukowski's Daughters

AUS1F2.4D-2025-Bukowski

Sugar Iris Aggeler 

Madness floats like lily pads in a pond, swirling senselessly. Painters paint dripping reds and greens and yellows. Poets rhyme their loneliness. Musicians, as always, starve and novelists lose their way, but not the pelican or the seagull. Pelicans swoop and dive, rise and shake radioactive fish, stunned, half-dead in their beaks. The sky explodes red and orange. Flowers open as they always have, but covered with the fine dust of rocket fuel and with mushrooms, poisonous mushrooms. And in a million rooms, lovers lie entwined, lost and sick as peace. Bukowski 1

Love, love:

Bourbon on the rocks brought me back this morning the memory of your hungry desire. You feed when you kiss, with languid, Siamese licks interspersed with wolfish ferocity. You suffocate, you devour, you caress with the aroma of fermenting barley. I sigh. I'm an alcoholic as a result of that terrible seduction you exert between daggers, absences, and vulgar letters. The glassy blue, indescribably pearly eyes of my cat watch me prepare a cocktail of absinthe, ouzo, and mezcal. Ice and ouzo slowly turn white ripples in the liquid, the absinthe sliding in an organic curtain toward the bottom of the glass. The hand-blown glass stirrer with a white rose on a green stem matches the alcohol. It's a cocktail with style... could I invite it to a minor? Or to Christ before his death? Or cover myself with this drink before leaving the bathroom naked without looking at you.

• The Los Angeles Public Library has been destroyed by flames, that downtown library, with it went a large part of my youth.2
• Our handwritten poetry, the children's drawings on the beach, the love letters you sent me from the Gothic Quarter, my father's photographs, the old castle where we made love in San Angelo have been destroyed by the flames. The wings of my innocence have rusted.
• Get off the stage, drunk! Fuck you Serking!
• I'll just take my wine and leave. OK, let's forget the bouchet and get into the soul called "Art."3
• We love you, Charlie!
• Style. Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art...4
• Style is probably the only thing that allows me to love you; You destroy my self-portraits with precise razor cuts, you dramatize the sink with your beard, blood, and the shards of the mirror. I like your hair, waist-length, cutting the air you travel through between piercing glances. Your scars seduce me, we are made of them; we were born survivors. 5
• Not many can keep style. I've seen dogs with more style than men. Even not many dogs have style. Cats have it in abundance... 6

I'm tired of wondering why I should love you when you live wrapped in a mortuary flag and tie! I love your words: "I was born to steal roses from the avenues of death." 7 "It's wrong, and it's not the norm, but I don't care: I see girls and I remember hair in the sink." 8 Your fury is so great in possessing me, in trying to possess us with your letters that one might think you're alive, yet language uses us to reproduce itself, we're not there. "Knowing that you don't write for the other, knowing that those things I'm going to write will never make me love the one I love, knowing that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it's precisely there where you're not; such is the beginning of writing."9 I like Ur sex: Mmmm...

like sex key beat clé tex stick on me
es enfer here est meauw! lips kiss sí kiwi
kill bunny burning out boom voy coming my boy
oky bar fly ugly fuck luck lío mio oro
love all liebe day ah! amor around and amore
Voss no higo girl miss sin venue rye mad

Mine music lover, wild aesthete, unrepentant nonconformist. I'm seduced by shared hatreds. I detest the banality of those who call us bohemians, strange but likable lunatics. Mother Fuckers! Fuck them in their simplicity! The obviousness of legible texts, like fairy tales, nauseates me; I prefer our fragile, damned words. I hate "good" (not at all) hypocritical consciences. Looking too long, with intensity, upsets all established orders. The stupid state controls the time and character of the gaze; hence, we are scandalous if we don't enter the ring of control. From desire, loving vigilance, the fragility of the unstable, arises the condition of the artist. We do nothing but throw ourselves into doubt with the conviction that the senses don't stop at happiness or at what is said, always further away, fascinated by the vibration of the path.

You smoke a cigarette in your miserable salaried 8 hours. You remember the percentages you charge London or the courts. Numb your ass, your brain, and your heart... (I'm fucking a grave, I thought, I'm reviving death, it's wonderful, wonderful, like eating cold olives at 3 am while half the city is burning) I came... went into the bathroom and took a good dump. I thought, good, I'm still alive I have a knack for expelling waste from my body and poems... "your poems about your women will live on 50 years after they're gone," my editor told me on the phone. Dear editor: it seems the girls have already left... she had just told me she wanted / to have a child, to get married and that outside / it was 40 degrees. / thinking about another child and another marriage / made me feel really bad. / I had resigned myself to dying alone / in a small room / and now she was trying to undo / my master plan... "son of a bitch you fucked me when I didn't feel like it. you told me to talk to you on the phone, to move near your place, and now you're coming out with that you want to be alone." It's all very dramatic, I enjoy it. "Sure, well, what do you want?"... he walked toward his car / I closed the door. / He knew what he wanted wasn't / me. / I know more women of this type / than any other.10

Surely you'll curse, Daughters of Bukowski!, when we share the stage in "ACME Brand Princesses,"11 a Conceptual Theater show in which we reveal the false innocence of fairy tales, with which mythology and hegemonic power transmit for generations the stereotype of passive waiting and female victimization. I have never been your victim, nor do I expect you to be my Prince Charming. You know I am my Prince Charming. I must save myself and be seduced by myself. I move with you to devour you like Drosera rotundifolia12 in heat, looking like a showgirl for a calendar by Eduardo Cataño. Without a doubt, menstrual blood—can it give or take life?—is evident in Judith Miriam Escherlor's tampon-like work13, and is one of the feminine mysteries. Time stops when your sperm claims my egg. My egg turns slightly to the right, and an iridescent glow covers the miracle, which will end with a morning-after pill, three days later.

I enter your miserable attic, cellar, loft, house-room? to fuck you. I wear stilettos and glossy red bilé, very red. My hair is a fuchsia rain that extends to the strappy lycra dress. Your penis reacts within the labyrinth created by my eyelashes, tits, and exotic perfume. There's a smell of a cat in heat at the door, a hint of marijuana and hot coffee with alcohol. I find you inside that brownish-white terrycloth robe stiffened by age. You lead me to your comforters, perforated by fire, the sheets stained with moisture, your closet vomits up rumpled and dirty clothes. Your tongue crosses its path between my breasts. You feel used. Why not pay you? I've even paid for the room with you, unemployed seducer-seduced? Yet I pay to maintain power, and I know the balls that will break at the end of the story are yours. I don't know why I know this; maybe one day I'll be the one who shatters like a mirror, thus shattering your reflection, this hellish love.

Borroughs shooting his wife; / Mailer stabbing his. / This is what they want: / a cursed god / who displays a neon sign / in the middle of hell. / This is what they want, / a bunch of idiots / scattered / safe / sad / admirers of / carnivals."

Kisses, with all my sweet love.

1. Bukowski, Germany, August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994. Writer of the beatnik generation, poet, screenwriter, vulgar, scamp, and authentic, his work is born from the depths of the human being, from real and concrete existence, a master of stark poetry. The Blanket, 1994. Lonely at the Top, 1993. Love Pig, 1990. Love Is a Hellish Dog, 1987. Barfly, 1987. The Killers, 1984. Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1982.
2. Bukowski. The Burning of a Dream.
3. Stories of Ordinary Folia. A Tale of Ordinary Madness. 1982, film by Marco Ferreri, adapted from Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski: Okay, let's forget about the bullshit and get into what's called "Art."
4. Bukowski, The Burning of a Dream. Style. Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way of approaching something stupid or dangerous. Doing something idiotic with style is preferable to doing something dangerous without style. Doing something dangerous with style is what I call art.
5. Reference to the song "I Was Born a Survivor."
6. Bukowski. Op cit. Not many can retain style. I've seen dogs with more style than men. Though not many dogs have style. Cats have it in abundance.
7. Bukowski. Culmination of Sorrow.
8. Bukowski. John Dillinger and the Mauler
9. Roland Barthes, Fragments of a Lover's Discourse.
10. Bukowski. Excerpts from poems from the book Love Is a Dog of Hell.
11. Iris Aggeler and Claudia Cabrera. ACME Brand Princesses. 2003. A performance that blends the basic elements of theater and conceptual arts genres: performance, video art, visual arts, etc. Based on classic stories such as Cinderella, Bluebeard, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, two comic book heroines challenge the symbolic stereotype of feminine passivity and create a cathartic dialogue that generates consequential actions to change mythology and history. They propose a satire that questions sex, femininity, and politics.
12. Drosera Rotundifolia: Carnivorous plant. When they catch an insect, carnivorous plants don't suck it up completely; they only absorb its proteins.
13. Judith Miriam Escherlor. Visual Artist.
14. Bukowski. What Do They Want, from the book Love Is a Hellhound.

Original publication: Mexico, Iris (2003) Bukowski's Daughters. Generation Magazine, 15th anniversary.