inside

 my father and the bum

my father believed in work.
he was proud to have a 
job.
sometimes he didn't have a
job and then he was very
ashamed.
he'd be so ashamed that he'd
leave the house in the morning
and then come back in the evening
so the neighbors wouldn't
know. 

me,
I liked the man next door:
he just sat in a chair in
his back yard and threw darts
at some circles he had painted
on the side of his garage.
in Los Angeles in 1930
he had a wisdom that
Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Freud,
Jaspers, Heidegger and
Toynbee would find hard
to deny.
 

Charles Bukowski