Charles Bukowski Wrote Poetry Like a Son of a B****h, and We Should Thank Him for It

Bukowski wrote angry. He wrote drunk. He wrote minutes after getting laid or listened restlessly all night to his neighbor trying to.

Then he got up and wrote about what he knew. About the homeless. The dissolute. Whatever heartache was ripping through his life at that moment.

The prostitutes he met on the street or in his apartment. About sex and the emptiness in his soul, his wallet, his future prospects.

He wasn’t a happy poet. He didn’t write about gloss or meaningful relationships or the love of one man for his dog.

The earth with all its trees and concrete and rusted metal gates was where he lived. Doors with broken hinges, windows that leaked cold winter air and neighbors who screamed and stamped their feet at 3 am was what his life looked like.

be careful less the onion blind the eye

or the snake sting

or the beetle possess the house

or the lover your wife

or the wine your will

or the butcher your belly

or the cat your chair

or the lawyer your ignorance of the law

or the law dressed as a uniformed man and killing you.

(Excerpt from - advice for some young men in the year 2064 A.D. - C. Bukowski)

He worked to live, to pay the rent, to buy the alcohol he consumed in great quantities. What he thought about made people wince. Made strangers want to run away and read Shelley and Keats. Flush his words from their systems, purge the pain and the heartache so they could breathe easily again.

Bukowski felt a lot of pain in his life. With each breath, cigarette between his lips. Ashtrays filled with old butts. A cat on the window ledge wanting to come in as the snow covered its tail. He didn’t let it get him down. He was meaner than it was and glared at it until it went away.

And yet he loved deeply. Felt every slight. Heard the words against him, passing quickly through the fog of vodka and beer. Cauterizing his wounds with the next poem or essay.

Numbing the pain by letting the words bleed from him on nights and weekends, until he was faint. Then fortified his soul with women and song and looking directly into the sun until he was blind to everything except what he needed to see.

He didn’t write about Beverly Hills, except about the men rifling through trash cans for food. He didn’t spend much time on Hollywood Tours, getting autographs or heading to the beaches of LA to surf and sun and turn his pale blemished skin into something worthy of a billboard ad.

they get up on their garage roof

both of them 80 or 90 years old

standing on the slant

she wanting to fall really

all the way

but hacking at the old roofing

with a hoe

and he

more coward

on his knees praying for more days

gluing chunks of tar

his ear listening

for more green rain

and he says

mama be careful

and she says nothing

and hacks a hole

where a tulip

never grew

(Excerpt from - 2 Outside, As Bones Break in My Kitchen: C. Bukowski)

Bukowski’s words reflected the dirt on the windshields, the cracks in the pavements, the hunched backs of the elderly couple walking down Sunset Blvd. He didn’t use poetry to paint a landscape everyone would want to visit.

He painted a landscape filled with derelict cars and abandoned homes and streetwalkers with short skirts covering nothing at all and eyes seeing nothing much as their days and nights blurred and life became a marathon.

But his words were brilliant and painful as truth often is and they reminded us of what advertisers want us so desperately to forget, that we can live without. And still smile and laugh and toast one another with cracked mugs and shirts with dirty collars and yet love the one sitting next to us.

He was scruffy and aged beyond his years and spent years of his life working at the post office, sorting mail. Counting hours. Listening to the whir of the machines, the low growl of the discontented and stored it all away.

Till he was alone at a table or on a bench. Leaning hard against the railing in his apartment house, head aching and writing another poem.

one of the terrible things is

really

being in bed

night after night

with a woman you no longer

want to screw.

they get old, they don’t look very good

anymore - they even tend to

snore, lose

spirit

so, in bed, you turn sometimes,

your foot touches hers -

god, awful! -

and the night is out there

beyond the curtains

sealing you together

in the

tomb

(Excerpt from - the screw-game: C. Bukowski)

Not every word could be read. Not every emotion could be experienced. Some were too painful. Some were meant to push you away. To reconsider everything, he had said. Everything he believed in. But to come back eventually.

To read again. Feel again. Not assume he was messing with you. Bending you to his will. Making you cry.

Bukowski somehow lost the filter that many of us write with. Making words more pleasant. A little more cheerful. Afraid to chase the few who come to us each week to someone else’s page.

He wrote them as he saw them. Warts and all. Graying hair, wrinkles from months in the sun, collecting cans and plastic bottles.

Using words like whore and filth and hungover and poop, sex and death and bad breath that stings the eyes.

His poetry was a chronicling of life. His life, every day. That maybe he failed to see the joy as often as others did; that he failed to take enough deep meaningful breaths that brought him to tears, didn’t matter.

He wrote about being down and being in pain and being lonely and living with a broken heart, so that all the other poets could write about love and joy and happiness and the readers would know what they were talking about.

He explained in simple every day terms what Up meant and what emptiness felt like so we could revel in the opposites. So, we wouldn’t be confused and fail to notice.

Reading Bukowski is like drinking coffee too hot, too strong, and too often so that everything else tastes better.

I will do 15 minutes of grieving

for the lost redhead,

I tell the gods.

I do it and feel quite bad

quite sad,

then I rise

CLEANSED

even though nothing is

solved.

that’s what I get for kicking

religion in the ass.

I should have kicked the redhead

in the ass

where her brains and her bread and

butter are

at . . .

but, no, I’ve felt sad

about everything:

the lost redhead was just another

smash in a lifelong

loss . . .

I listen to drums on the radio now

and grin.

there is something wrong with me

besides

melancholia.

(Excerpt from - melancholia: C. Bukowski)

It’s easy to be dissuaded from writing about what hurts us and makes us sad, opting for the lighter touch. The bluer skies. Neither is right nor wrong. Two sides to the same world really.

When we write about our sadness or the loneliness we feel while riding the bus to work, no one should believe that is all we feel. It’s simply what draws us to the page that day. Joy comes soon enough. And if it isn’t written about for all to see, it doesn’t mean we never feel it.

Charles Bukowski was a poet, standing on the highest pitch of the roof waiting for the lightning to strike him again because it made him feel alive. Made him angry and from that anger his truth emerged.

And if in doing so others might be spared that particular form of pain, so be it.

There’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I’m too tough for him,

I say,

stay down, do you want to mess

me up?

you want to screw up the

works?

you want to blow my book sales in

Europe?

There’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I’m too clever, I only let him out

at night sometimes

when everybody’s asleep.

I say, I know that you’re there,

so don’t be sad.

(Excerpt from - Bluebird: C. Bukowski