Slouching Toward Nirvana:new Poems: New Poems

in this place

there are the dead, the deadly and the dying.

there is the cross, the builders of the cross and the burners of the

cross.

the pattern of my life forms like a cheap shadow

on the wall before me.

my love

what is left of it

now must crawl

to wherever it can crawl.

the strongest know that death is

final

and the happiest are those gifted with the

shortest journey.

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 Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).