The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

Water color by Kevin Peshkepia


The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship


There's nothing to mourn about death
any more than there is to mourn about
the growing of a flower.
What is terrible is not death but
the lives people live or don't live
up until their death.

They don't honor their own lives,
they piss on their lives.
They shit them away.
Dumb fuckers.
They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money,
family, fucking.
Their minds are full of cotton.

They swallow God without thinking,
they swallow country without thinking.
Soon they forget how to think,
they let others think for them.
Their brains are stuffed with cotton.

They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly.
Play them the great music of the centuries
and they can't hear it.
Most people's deaths are a sham.
There's nothing left to die.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!
That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't.
We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities,
we are eaten up by nothing.


Charles Bukowski

Posted over on Wikiquote