Poetry isn’t always happy

Charles Bukowski Wrote Poetry Like a Real Son of a Bitch, and We Should Thank Him for It

Reality is both good and bad

Bukowski wrote angry. He wrote drunk. He wrote minutes after getting laid or having 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, and 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 stomped their feet at 3 am were 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, 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, a 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 the wounds with his 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, and 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. Or 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, toward 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 everyday 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 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