charles bukowski

The wave lent me this book of poetry titled "The Continual Condition". By and large, it's fairly depressing stuff. I can certainly picture the jaded old man who wrote it.
Here are a few pieces which caught my mind's eye.

"my art form" reminds me, in a melancholy way, of my friend who lent the book to me. Like a jockey who must occasionally win to keep his job, the writer feels he is having to prove himself by occasionally doing something well enough to remain a writer, rather than "a whore who can't score." Instead, the writer had dreamt of becoming "the happy idiot able to get food easily and easy sympathy, a planned confusion of not too much love or effort." The writer ends with the postulate that, to some, he has achieved that dream through his choice of his life's work.
Definitely sad to me.

"listening to the radio at 1:35 a.m." is another sad piece that appealed to me. In it, the writer seems to be wishing he were at a beach house, listening to the waves, instead of fighting for his life "within these 4 walls 20 miles inland". But with the tongue of the cynic, of the beach house scene he painted he says "you can feel crappy there too-". Sadly, I know that to be true.
Definitely sad to me.

But he did have one piece I regard as hopeful.
"I saw a tramp last night" tells of an old cur going "down nobody's alley being nobody's dog... moving through it all, brave as any army." I do believe I can relate to that old dog, feeling as I sometimes do that I belong to no one, alone in the world, but moving along still.
Melancholy, yes. But also hopeful.