Thank You Bukowski

...I never post the work of other people, but I was just so enthralled with this Bukowski poem that I felt the need to share it with somebody.


Charles Bukowski- A Smile to Remember

We had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, “be happy Henry!”
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week
while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?“

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled

I knew I would take the wrong train so I left early.

It's an old cliche, I know, but it really is true. Sometimes the best thing come in small packages. But wait, let's think about what we just said here for a minute. What is this notion of "things" (whatever that word means) coming in packages? Why does my great small thing have to come in any package at all? Because I bought it, that's why.
Next time you go into a store, any store really, take a look around. What do you see? Shelves lined with plastic see-through containers and cardboard boxes with images of the good that is contained inside it.
Think about this. We go to this store, we are overwhelmed with all these things they have for us to buy. Yet we are completely convinced that they have what we want. Listen, they tell us what we want. When we find a really nice shirt we think we've won- we have wandered through the depths of the aisles of this store and picked out this one shirt that is so for us. For me. Shirts, pants, socks- dozens of each type in different sizes and colors surrounding us and somehow we decide on this particular shirt.
"Mine" you think in your head. "This is my shirt".
Wrong.

We are told what to like and we accept it without a fucking thought. We let it run right into our heads like dumb little assholes. When we were young, we would pick and choose our friends by which clothes they wear- by which standardized bullshit their mom bought for them. And the worst part is we still do this. We are the product of a society built on exploitation that not only handicaps the exploited physically, but mentally handicaps the "beneficiaries" as well. In a word or two, nobody benefits from this. And yet we continue to work as hard as we can to keep it in place.

the everyday

What you look at everyday is going to affect your thinking. The university I study at happens to be quite unappealing, so I thought I would start first with this wall. When I go outside here, it is not as if a new thought is going to strike me. You have to create your own pleasure. What have you created?

It's a strange feeling, being the first one to wake up and the last one to go to sleep. You sit up, in a feverish state, reading, working, thinking. All the while, most everybody else is sleeping, doing nothing. It's always strange that while you are still alive, still awake, they are dead, sleeping. To me there hardly is any difference. You know that feeling, when you are reading your favorite novel, but your eyes are slowly closing. The words all begin to double, triple and and you can't read a thing anymore. The voice in your head, you know, that one that reads to you? The voice in your head starts echoing. You are in a cave, it's getting darker and the echos get louder. The light is fading out and why the hell are my eyelids so fucking heavy? Your thoughts begin to leave you. What was I just reading?

Your eyes shoot open. Whoa. What just happened? You reset you gaze on a few lines earlier and keep on reading. Slowly the feeling comes back. Now I'm angry. All I want to do is read this but no, my body has to to fight me. It says to me, "Close your eyes! Go to sleep! We need to rest...now!" But I really don't want to. The last thing I want to do is sleep. Another sip of coffee and you feel like you are going to throw up, but you cannot think of anything else to keep yourself awake. No, a nap and then continuation is not an option. This is called giving in. Giving into this crap is so bad for you. Sometimes you need to force yourself through these things, unless you want to become one of them. You know what I mean, one of them. One of them who drive around drinking large sodas. Eating burgers. Watching television. One of them who allows all their stimulation to come from some sort of screen. "Feed me information!" How much of this are you going to retain if you let someone else shove it down your throat for you? Do you really think? Do you ever think? I always wonder what goes on in the mind of these people. Do you think anything ever goes on?

I know of a woman. Constantly people are asking her, "are you alright, are you okay?". Her answer is usually, "Yeah, why do you ask?". She bares the mark, the oh-so-typical sign that I love. She seethes with experience, knowledge- she knows. She is someone I want to talk to, or rather, someone that I want to talk with. And I will talk with her any chance that I get.

Here are a few things that I once noticed.

Today I happened to overhear someones conversation.

"Yeah, this was a really rough winter."

Was it? Because if I'm going to be completely honest with you, I would have to tell you that yes, I remember what this winter was like, but I could not tell you at all what it was like last winter. Last winter for me was marked by events. Feelings. Moods. A nice little drawing of myself holding a Jack Daniels bottle and saying "I'm so depressed". How am I now supposed to compare this winter with last winter? Who really bothers to remember the temperature anyway? I'll tell you how it goes- in the winter it's cold. In the summer it's hot. How hot is it?
"Oh its hot"
Is there anybody out there who can tell me how hot it is? What instruments do we have to help us figure this out?
"Listen, we have a problem and we have to figure it out."

As people, why do we feel such a need to know these numbers, these specifics. What makes us so worried that we can't just let it flow. We invent these numbers on a glass tube filled with an "element" (what the hell is an element) that tell us, "you should go get a sweatshirt". We no longer have to feel the outside. The number will surely tell us what to do.
We invent these numbers. We become slaves to these numbers. In the past 100 years religion has died. Humanity is on the code red extinction warning scale. We better be careful or else any notion of human-ness will vanish as fast as the idea of good did with Hiroshima. Was WWII not the last "clear" war? There were the good guys and the bad guys right? Well that's how I learned it. That's how they taught it to me. In the end it all becomes numbers.
Lives become numbers. Numbers I can not imagine.
We find out they (yes, it's they again) want to spend a trillion dollars to "fix" the economy. What is a trillion? Does this number come from anywhere? Is there anything I can touch, I can place my pointer finger on and think "oh yes, that's a trillion".

Mostly, I'm scared of losing the last strands of humanity to something I could never comprehend.
Mostly, I'm scared of not seeing human interaction. A grandfather lights a firecracker that is in his grandson's hand- "Here, now throw it!"

Crack.

The sound of laughter seemingly becomes louder as the echoing of the mini-explosion fans out against the brick walls of a snow ridden Berlin landscape, and I know that somehow it will be okay.