Richard Brautigan

This poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. The author is unknown. By accident, you put Your money in my Machine (#4) By accident, I put My money in another Machine (#6) On purpose, I put Your clothes in the Empty machine full Of water and no Clothes It was lonely.

Three crates of Private Eye Lettuce, the name and drawing of a detective with magnifying glass on the sides of the crates of lettuce, form a great cross in man’s imagination and his desire to name the objects of this world. I think I’ll call this place Golgotha and have some salad for dinner.

It’s a star that looks like a poker game above the mountains of eastern Oregon. There are three men playing. They are all sheepherders. One of them has two pair, the others have nothing.

When you take your pill it’s like a mine disaster. I think of all the people lost inside of you.

A girl in a green mini- skirt, not very pretty, walks down the street. A businessman stops, turns to stare at her ass that looks like a moldy refrigerator. There are now 200,000,000 people in America.

I feel horrible. She doesn’t love me and I wander around the house like a sewing machine that’s just finished sewing a turd to a garbage can lid.

A piece of green pepper fell off the wooden salad bowl: so what?

Driving through hot brushy country in the late autumn, I saw a hawk crucified on a barbed-wire fence. I guess as a kind of advertisement to other hawks, saying from the pages of a leading women’s magazine, “She’s beautiful, but burn all the maps to your body. I’m not here of my own choosing.”

At 1:03 in the morning a fart smells like a marriage between an avocado and a fish head. I have to get out of bed to write this down without my glasses on.

I don’t care how God-damn smart these guys are: I’m bored. It’s been raining like hell all day long and there’s nothing to do.