between the shadow and the soul

girl in shorts, biting your nails, revolving your ass,
the boys are looking at you—-
you hold more, it seems,
than Gauguin or Brahma or Balzac,
more, at least, than the skulls that swim at our feet,
your swagger breaks the Eiffel tower,
turns the heads of old newsboys long ago gone
sexually to pot;
your caged malarkey, your idiot’s dance,
mugging it, delightful—-don’t ever wash stained under-
wear or chase your acts of love
through neighborhood alleys—-
don’t spoil it for us,
putting on weight and weariness,
settling for TV and a namby-pamby husband;
don’t give up that absurd dispossessed wiggle
to water a Saturday’s front lawn—-
don’t send us back to Balzac or introspection
or Paris
or wine, don’t send us back
to the incubation of our doubts or the memory
of death-wiggle, bitch, madden us with love
and hunger, keep the sharks, the bloody sharks,
from the heart.

by Charles Bukowski from The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)