the piano has been drinking

This afternoon on the 4 train I finished reading Charles Bukowski’s The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps, a collection of his later poems. It failed to impress, but only cuz I’ve read enough of his prose to know what I was in for (i.e. the same old themes, this time cut up into stanzas and disguised as poetry).

To be clear, I'm not launching a polemical assault on ol’ Buk. The man knows how to write, and he’s most always—to quote Modest Mouse—a “pretty good read.” I'm hard-pressed to name a writer more approachable on a minimal, guttoral level; Buk chronicles his own failed, depraved existence with humor and self-flagellating earnestness, a rare feat. Joes from all over encounter his poems and adopt the “if that old pervert can do it, I can do it too!” credo, and why not? Buk’s just like them! We’ve all met a prospective Bukowski or two, it's just most of ’em don’t take time away from their leering and their farts to write it all down. What’s to hate about a writer who drinks mammoth amounts of beer, lives out a paycheck-to-paycheck existence and, when he does write, mercifully refrains from Updiking you with his muscular vocabulary?

He's not out to fool anybody. You know what you’re getting into when you pick up a Bukowski. There's no aces up the sleeve.

But.

Back to the book in question. Near the end—the last forty pages or so—I tired of the poetry of Mr. Buk. I’ve always figured that If you’ve read one Buk, you’ve read them all. Booze, women, whores, horses, Los Angeles, stained sheets, Mahler, etc., etc. Repeat. I know the formula, but that didn’t stop me from breaking out the whine (no pun intended…ha!) today on the train: "C’mon, Buk, shake it up a bit!"

But then ol’ Buk came thru in the clutch! Yanked up the rug and sent me flying on my ass. He closed the collection with this poem, a dandy, in response to my gripe:

wine pulse

this is another poem about 2 a.m. and I’m still at the
machine listening to the radio and smoking a good
cigar.
hell, I don’t know, sometimes I feel just like Van Gogh or
Faulkner or,
say, Stravinsky, as I sip wine and type
and smoke and there’s no magic as gentle as this.
some critics say I write the same things over and over.
well, sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, but when I do the
reason is that it feels so right, it’s like making love and
if you knew how good it felt you would forgive me
because we both know how fickle happiness can be.
so I play the fool and say again that
it’s 2 a.m.
and that I am
Cezanne
Chopin
Celine
Chinaski
embracing everything:
the sweet of cigar smoke
another glass of wine
the beautiful young girls
the criminals and the killers
the lonely mad
the factory workers,
this machine here,
the radio playing,
I repeat it all again
and I’ll repeat it all forever
until the magic that happens to me
happens to you.
...