Charles Bukowski - Clerks and You lyrics

Something for the touts, the nuns
The grocery clerks and you

We have everything and we have nothing
And some men do it in churches
And some men do it by
Tearing butterflies in half
And some men do it in Palm Springs
Laying it into butter-blondes
With Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
Nothing and everything
The face melting down to the last puff
In a cellar in Corpus Christi
There's something for the touts, the nuns
The grocery clerks and you
Something at eight am, something
In the library, Something in the river
Everything and nothing
In the slaughterhouse it comes running along
The ceiling on a hook, Can you swing it?


One, two, three and then you've got it
Two hundred dollars worth of dead meat
It's bones against your bones
Something and nothing
It's always early enough to die
And it's always too late
And the drill of blood in the basin
White it tells you nothing at all
And the gravediggers playing poker
Over 5 am coffee
Waiting for the grass to dismiss the frost
They tell you nothing at all
We have everything and we have nothing
Days with glass edges and
The impossible stink
Of river moss worse than shit
Checkerboard days of moves and countermoves
Fagged interest
With as much sense in defeat as in victory
Slow days like mules
Humping and slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
Up a road where a madman sit's
Waiting among bluejays and wrens
Netted in and sucked a flaky grey
Good days too of wine and shouting
Fights in alleys, fat legs of
Women striving around your bowels
Buried in moans the signs in bullrings like
Diamonds hollering Mother Capri
Violets coming out of the ground
Telling you to forget
The dead armies and the loves that robbed you
Days when children say funny
And brilliant things
Like savages trying to send you
A message through their bodies
While their bodies are still
Alive enough to transmit
And feel and run up and down
Without locks and paychecks and ideals
And possessions and beetle-like opinions
Days when you can cry all day long in
A green room with the door locked
Days when you can laugh at the bread
Man because his legs are too long
Days of looking at hedges

And nothing, and nothing
The days of the bosses
Yellow men with bad breath and big feet
Men who look like frogs, hyenas
Men who walk as if melody
Had never been invented
Men who think it is intelligent to
Hire and fire and profit
Men with expensive wives they possess like
60 acres of ground to be
Drilled or shown-off or to be
Walled away from the incompetent
Men who'd kill you because they're
Crazy and justify it because it's the law
Men who stand in front of windows
30 feet wide and see nothing
Men with luxury yachts who can
Sail around the world
And yet never get out of their vest pockets
Men like snails, men like
Eels, men like slugs, And not as good
And nothing
Getting your last paycheck at a harbor
At a factory, at a hospital
At an aircraft plant, at a
Penny arcade, at a barbershop
At a job you didn't want anyway
Income tax, sickness, servility, broken arms
Broken heads all the stuffing
Come out like an old pillow
We have everything and we have nothing
Some do it well enough for a
While and then give way
Fame gets them or disgust or
Age or lack of proper
Diet or ink across the eyes
Or children in college
Or new cars or broken backs
While skiing in Switzerland
Or new politics or new wives
Or just natural change and decay
The man you knew yesterday hooking for
Ten rounds or drinking for
Three days and three nights by
The Sawtooth mountains now
Just something under a sheet or
A cross, or a stone
Or under an easy delusion
Or packing a bible or a
Golf bag or a briefcase
How they go, how they go!
All the ones you thought would never go

Days like this, like your day today
Maybe the rain on the window trying
To get through to you what do you see today?
What is it? where are you?
The best days are sometimes the
First, sometimes the middle
And even sometimes the last
The vacant lots are not bad
Churches in Europe on postcards are not bad?
People in wax museums frozen into their
Best sterility are not bad?
Horrible, but not bad?
The cannons, think of the cannon
And toast for breakfast and coffee hot enough
To know your tongue is still there
Three geraniums outside a window
Trying to be red and trying to be
Pink and trying to be geraniums
No wonder sometimes the women cry
No wonder the mules don't wanna
Go up the hill are you in a hotel room in
Detroit looking for a cigarette?
One more good day, a little bit of it
And as he nurses come out of
The building after their shift
Having had enough
Eight nurses with different names
And different places
To go Walking across the lawn
Some of them want cocoa and a paper
Some of them want a hot bath
Some of them want a man, Some
Of them are hardly thinking at all
Enough and not enough
Arcs and pilgrims, oranges
Gutters, ferns, antibodies, Boxes of
Tissue paper
In the most decent sometimes sun
There is the softsmoke feeling from urns
And the canned sound of old battleplanes
And if you go inside and run your finger
Along the window ledge you'll find dirt
Maybe even earth
And if you look out the window
There will be the day
And as you get older you'll keep looking
Keep looking sucking your tongue in a little
Ah, ah, no, no, maybe

Some do it naturally some obscenely
Everywhere