Thursday, December 28, 2017

Robbie Masso writes



Bukowski

Bukowski wrote
“what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.”

he believed that –
that’s why he didn’t kill himself

he was not a hypocrite –
an exaggerator
or actor,
yes,
but not a hypocrite

he believed that
and it hurts me

it hurts me
because I do not do well with fire

I am a coward –
just like Bukowski

he hated cowards
so he hated himself
and he’d hate me

Bukowski didn’t walk well
through the fire
he wasn’t talking about himself
when he wrote that line
he was talking about
the people he idolized

my idol
wouldn’t
idolize me
 Image result for bukowski paINTING
 Charles Bukowski -- Johnny Meyer

1 comment:

  1. How Is Your Heart?

    during my worst times
    on the park benches
    in the jails
    or living with
    whores
    I always had this certain
    contentment -
    I wouldn't call it
    happiness -
    it was more of an inner
    balance
    that settled for
    whatever was occurring
    and it helped in the
    factories
    and when relationships
    went wrong
    with the
    girls.
    it helped
    through the
    wars and the
    hangovers
    the backalley fights
    the
    hospitals.
    to awaken in a cheap room
    in a strange city and
    pull up the shade -
    this was the craziest kind of
    contentment

    and to walk across the floor
    to an old dresser with a
    cracked mirror -
    see myself, ugly,
    grinning at it all.
    what matters most is
    how well you
    walk through the
    fire.

    Charles Bukowski began writing "Pulp" in 1991 but it was only 3/4 done when he fell ill. He published it in 1994, shortly before his death of leukemia on 9 March at 73. He dedicated it to "bad writing." The novel contained some of his most violent, cynical, sarcastic, and shocking material. Lady Death, a beautiful and mysterious woman, hires private detective Nicky Belane to locate Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who has thus far avoided her. Céline, the author of "Voyage au bout de la nuit" (Journey to the End of the Night), which, like much of Bukowski's work, used the rhythms and vocabulary of the working class to express notions of failure, anxiety, nihilism, and inertia. Belane also bcomes "enveloped" by the elusive Red Sparrow. George Stade viewed the novel as "a farewell to readers, as a gesture of rapprochement with death, as Bukowski's sendup and send-off of himself." He identified the Red Sparrow as a spoof of the Black Sparrow Press which published his work; Belane's envelopment would thus be akin to the way a dead writer becomes absorbed by his own words. (Some, like Céline, continue to live after their own deaths.)

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