all theories like cliches shot to hell, all these small faces looking up beautiful and believing; I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard. we have narrowed it down to the butcherknife and the mockingbird wish us luck. In one sentence: Just a man in a room - odd, then, that this is enough to make people read them voluntarily, religiously, unlike almost all contemporary poetry with their bigger brains and better politics and more eventful stories and uplifting messages. To be read when: you can't sleep and it's 2am and tomorrow's going to be a pain in the arse and you're alone in the house; no better book then. Unbeatable at sliding through the mind with zero friction, depositing emotional silt and cheap, warm style from a previously insane and helpfully hopeless man in you – whatever you want that for. More than any other poet, he just literally talks to you. You can roll your eyes at his gaucheness and despise his chauvinism and feel nothing all you like: that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's not the point. So it's barely art, but he knows it. Pity any academic working on CB: these poems don't invite analysis; they are worn on their own surface. They mean just what they first mean. Many of them are just about writing poems, but I cannot resent their hollowness, since emptiness is his brush. Its main virtue is complete honesty. ...so much has gone by for most of us, even the young, especially the young for they have lost the beginning and have the rest of the way to go; but isn’t it strange, all i can think of now are cucumbers, oranges, junk yards, the old Lincoln Heights jail and the lost loves that went so hard and almost brought us to the edge, the faces now without features, the love beds forgotten. the mind is kind: it retains the important things: cucumbers oranges junk yards jails. ...there used to be over 100 of us in that big room in that jail i was in there many times. you slept on the floor men stepped on your face on the way to piss. always a shortage of cigarettes. names called out during the night (the few lucky ones who were bailed out) never you. ...when love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself. we ask for no mercy or no miracles; we are strong enough to live and to die and to kill flies, attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can’t sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles; and don’t forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless Everything that people mock Leonard Cohen for is much more true of Bukowski (misery, drawling, self-obsession, archness, chauvinism, treating the whole world as your confessional); he is just more direct and macho about it; that fact, and the very different crowd surrounding his medium is enough to earn him contempt rather than mockery. (And contempt is a kind of involuntary respect.) Backwards analogy: Bukowski is Tom Waits minus gospel, minus FX pedals, minus Brecht and Weill, minus one steady Kathleen peer. And minus metre of course. A grumpy adolescent old man; a sensitising misanthrope; a beautiful lech. He has only two modes: midnight countercultural raving and laconic woke-at-noon observation. Neither would work without his lecherousness and/or meanness and/or arrogance; they are the absolutely necessary breve before he blares out his concern. moments of agony and moments of glory march across my roof. the cat walks by seeming to know everything. my luck has been better, I think, than the luck of the cut gladiolus, although I am not sure. I have been loved by many women, and for a hunchback of life, that’s lucky. so many fingers pushing through my hair so many arms holding me close so many shoes thrown carelessly on my bedroom rug. so many searching hearts now fixed in my memory that i’ll go to my death, remembering. I have been treated better than I should have been— not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women. but there have been other women who have left me standing in the bedroom alone doubled over— hands holding the gut— thinking why why why why why why? women go to men who are pigs women go to men with dead souls women go to men who fuck badly women go to shadows of men women go go because they must go in the order of things. the women know better but often chose out of disorder and confusion. they can heal with their touch they can kill what they touch and I am dying but not dead yet. (That ^ might have gotten your back up, because it pattern-matches to modern whining about women's choices. But it isn't that: remember, from above, that he is calling himself a pig and a dead soul.) This is three books written over thirty years, one sentence per ten lines as always, stapled together to give the impression of a late-life opus. It covers the whole lot: his Great Depression origin myth; his meaningless, crabbed middle years; and his long, long late period spent in contempt of the arty people who pay and applaud him. I am nothing like him, except maybe in sense of humour. He is not anti-modern - grew up through the Great Depression, a simulation of pre-modern subsistence; loves shit cars; lives for late night recorded music - but science, growth, and the expanding circle give him nothing of the sense of direction, transcendence and hope that it gives to me and mine. But still I "relate", as the disgusting verb puts it. I have read this a half-dozen times in a dozen years. (It isn't hard; it takes an hour.) I know of no better poet to begin to explain why poetry is good and unique and feeds life. This surely says something about my character, but I don't expect to stop reading it. PS: Bukowski's epitaph is "Don't try". On the face of it that's mean and funny and fine, but it also means what Yoda means by it: Don't force it; Don't betray your nature; Do only what you are absolutely aligned behind. Is that good advice? Maybe not, but it is epitomises the man more than the nihilistic joke. Galef type: Values 3 - written from a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside.

think i’m running out of bukowski books to read *panics* What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire is an absolutely perfect example of finding beauty in the ugly. “I write poetry, worry, smile, laugh, sleep, continue for a while just like most of us just like all of us; sometimes I want to hug all Mankind on earth and say, god damn all this that they’ve brought down upon us, we are brave and good even though we are selfish and kill each other and kill ourselves, we are the people born to kill and die and weep in dark rooms and love in dark rooms, and wait, and wait and wait and wait. we are the people. we are nothing more.”