Bukowski

A friend of mine told me that I write like Charles Bukowski “if Bukowski was ironically funny.” I said, “But, Bukowski is ironically funny.” “Not in the way you are,” he said. Fair enough. I am not Bukowski, after all.

I have never bet on a horse, and no matter how hard I try, I am not really an alcoholic. I do have very poor impulse control, but I’m not really addicted to anything anymore.

I don’t write poetry, unless you consider the occasional haiku battle royale to be poetry. Sometimes, I have whole conversations with some friends written in haiku (<- that sentence is a haiku). But beware; thinking in five-seven-five is hard to stop once you start (<-also a haiku).

Bukowski lived in a different era than I do. Also, he had a penis. I do not. Therefore, we are bound to have two entirely different perspectives on the world. We do share the same city, though.

Another friend of mine says that Bukowski was a one-trick pony. He says he did that trick better than nearly anyone, but still, it was just the one trick. I suppose what my friend said is a little true, even though I don’t entirely agree. Women, booze, gambling, work, life in Los Angeles and the tortures of being a struggling writer were his main topics. I don’t really write about any of the above, except maybe the last three.

Bukowski was much more prolific that I am. The man wrote every damn day for forty years or more. I try to force myself to write every day, but the words just don’t come. This week has been a pretty good week for writing. The words have just been flooding out. I wish every day could be like that, but I’d never get anything done.

I have little to no control over my writing, when you get down to it. The words form themselves in my mind. I have hardly anything to do with it at all. I’ll be taking a shower, driving or be otherwise occupied, and a sentence just pops into my mind. Then another follows, and maybe one after that. I’ll go to my laptop, open it up and they all come out like prisoners into a yard. They mill about in little groups until I put them into some sort of order. It’s not a conscious or deliberate thing.

Sometimes, I’ll read something I wrote a while ago and it doesn’t even seem like I wrote it. I’ll read something I wrote and laugh as if I never heard the joke before, even though it came from inside of me. Or I’ll read a sentence and think, “I wrote that? Hey, that’s pretty good!” but it doesn’t sound like me. It is me, but it’s not a conscious part of me. The words come from some hidden part and all I do is write them down like a court reporter. It’s nice that there’s something I can do subconsciously without much effort.

I can write something like this here thing that I’m writing now, and when I read it just minutes later, I’m already disconnected from it. If I lose a section of what I wrote, because I’m dumb enough to compose in WordPress (which has happened far too many times), I won’t be able to get it back. Once it’s out of me, I don’t seem to remember it all that well. I can’t even quote myself. Forgetting my own writing does allow me to read it more objectively, though.

A thousand years ago, I had a boyfriend who was mainly an asshole. He was a drunk musician who continually kept me at arms length, but I will always look back fondly on that asshole because he was the one who first introduced me to Bukowski. He handed me a copy of Post Office and said read this.

After that, I sought out more and more and more. Fortunately, there are more words written by Bukowski than you could probably track down in a lifetime and more long-lost books are published all the time. Bukowski is like the Tupac of books; there are more posthumous releases every year. I still haven’t even come close to reading it all.

Bukowski has been one of my favorite contemporary writers for a long time now. Even when I was only reading books that were more than fifty years old and originally written in another language (particularly books with appendices), Bukowski was the one contemporary American author I would name if asked.

Although the differences between us are great, I identify with Bukowski a little bit. I relate to his struggle. I relate to his yearning to be free from all the petty things in life that bog us all down. I envy the particular way in which he puts simple words together to form a new and surprising sentence.

As far as writing like Bukowski is concerned, while I will gladly take the compliment – and I do look at is as a compliment, maybe the best I’ve ever received – I think I’ll stick to writing like an ironically funny version of me.

Goldfish
“my goldfish stares with watery eyes
into the hemisphere of my sorrow;
upon the thinnest threads
we hang together,
hang hang hang
in the hangman’s noose;
I stare into his place and
he into mine . . .
he must have thoughts,
can you deny this?
he has eyes and hunger
and his love too
died in January; but he is
gold, really gold, and I am grey
and it is indecent to search him out,
indecent like the burning of peaches
or the rape of children,
and I turn and look elsewhere,
but I know that he is there behind me,
one gold goblet of blood,
one thing alone
hung between the reddest cloud
of purgatory
and apt. no. 303.