Tag: American Writers

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The Bard Of Hollywood – Charles Bukowski

The Bard of Hollywood

By Marcus D. Niski

He was a tough motherfucker
at least he’d like to have
us think that he was.

Everyday he’d get up
And start drinking and writing
Writing and drinking.

Yet under that
beer barrel chest
lay the heart of a lion,
a heart of gold

He gave us his best stuff
Fresh from the suburbs, the factories
the pool halls, the wastelands, the racetracks, the detritus
of urban life.

He never gave up
and never
gave in until
he gave his last
which as good as his best

He never understood
the human condition
because he was always striving.

‘He didn’t think much of them’
The Humans that is.

One of the most acute observers,
He laid his soul bare

And he told of the blood, the puss
the stink, the shit, the beauty, the horror
and the mundanity of life.

He lived life
To its fullest
despite his own queer
deviations.

Bukowski
was a one-shot deal
An original even if it’s a clique
To suggest it.

His writing lives on
In eternity
To grace us with its realness,
Its sorrows

And its beauty.

[MN] 15 January 2020

Dedicated to Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) – one of my great literary heroes.

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Paul Auster — The Vale of Soul-Making

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is tractable, where all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely. 

— Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude. (Sun Publishing 1982)

Paul Auster — The Vale of Soul-Making