This post includes affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of these links we will get a commission, which helps us maintain the site, at no extra cost to you.
Drew Barrymore appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and finished off her segment by reading the Charles Bukowski poem, “So Now?”
The poem is a meditation on life and death by Bukowski shortly before he passed away from leukemia in 1994.
Barrymore said she wanted to do something to make the show more “personal,” so she put together a list of poems for them to read.
Colbert followed up by reading the Oscar Mayer Bologna song.
Watch below, it’s cued up to start at the relevant point. Text of the poem follows as well.
“So Now?” by Charles Bukowski
the words have come and gone,
I sit ill.
the phone rings, the cats sleep.
Linda vacuums.
I am waiting to live,
waiting to die.
I wish I could ring in some bravery.
it’s a lousy fix
but the tree outside doesn’t know:
I watch it moving with the wind
in the late afternoon sun.
there’s nothing to declare here,
just a waiting.
each faces it alone.
Oh, I was once young,
Oh, I was once unbelievably
young!
