Ah the beauty of Buk! The weakness and the vulnerability coming out in bite-size pieces. Enough to help us feel into our own. When there’s nothing else, there is poetry. Give me another shot of whiskey too! 🙏❤️
I found this so beautifully written but it is very dark. Is this metaphor representing the self under the abuse if one’s inner critic or is it stretching out further than that. Does the bluebird represent another relationship? It’s not possible to ignore because it reaches you under the skin.
Sometimes in his most beautiful poems, Bukowski goes into his specific situation, and that is always a letdown for me. Like the line "you want to blow my book sales in Europe?" . It somehow turns the poem applicable to all of us to a poem only for Bukowski.
I always believed those were the most poignant lines in the poem. Bukowski was celebrated as a poet of the underground, a grimy, dark, outlaw poet who was known for booze and whores and street life shenanigans. "You want to blow my book sales in Europe" is Bukowski contemplating and concealing his own vulnerably, his own tenderhearted nature beneath the ragged exterior of his own frayed and jagged persona.
I feel the particularity makes ghe poem more relateable not less...alluding to ambition and security anxieties (money) putting the bluebird back in its cage
He let it out all the time, don't let him fool you. His poems still reverberate throughout the cosmos. He's achieved more than most "clean", sober minded people. As Churchill once said, which applies aptly to Bukowski: "All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
Based on this poem, Bukowski did not let his blue bird fly and sing as it desperately wanted to do, and he wrote that acknowledgement to the blue bird, but was the blue bird comforted?
Again I ask, was the blue bird comforted by this poem, or by only being let out at night sometimes?
it’s a beautiful poem, but it also is a very sad poem.
My perspective is affected by having two parents defend themselves and dampen their souls with booze from rising in the morning to turning in at night. I respect Bukowski’s honesty, but if he did not cry, something was very, very wrong.
I agree with you entirely yet I understand his point of view too. How sad this world would be if we would be all alike. Some need to hear from time to time the shards of broken glass that once formed their being, scattering on the floor to make sure they are still alive 😉
And, how AWFUL this world would be if we would be all alike :-)!
But uniqueness is not what humanity, in the main, seems to think is important, given the susceptibility of most people to social, religious, educational, political, etc. robotic programming and needing to belong to this or that herd, which Bukowski did not do, based on all I have read of his at Poetic Outlaws, but for whom, shamefully, I still might not know he had existed. I have to wonder what pain or whatever in him caused him to buffer, even squelch, the blue bird; cause him to buffer, even squelch is pain with cigarettes and booze and, yes, prostitutes?
My mother told me that she started smoking 2 packs of Pall Malls a day at age 15 to. rebel against her Puritan parents, and she got up drinking vodka and went to be drinking vodka, and when she tried to divorce my father, her mother told her, if she went through with it, would kill her (mother). So, my mother buried herself in her church and called off the divorce and contracted lung cancer and it spread around in hr and she got her divorce from my father and her mother and father.
My father didn’t smoke, but he got up drinking vodka and went to be drinking it, and he came unglued when my mother died, and he wept every night for months, as his real feelings overpowered the vodka and everything else in him. But he did not stop drinking for a ver long time, and by then he had morphine topump to relieve pain in his spine, which had suffered from weight beyond its power and medicine’s ken.
I probably should thank my paren for encouraging me not to drown myself in booze, and I never smoked a cigarette. I got to deal with my angry bowel pain head on, and what lies underneath it, for decades, and it still greets me when I wake up each morning, and it accompanies me thorughout the day into the night and bedtime, and even in my sleep. Yet, I know where it comes from, or where most of it comes from, I have admitted what I did to cause it, but what others did I can only indulge, and I take nothing to reduce it, because nothing I ever tried worked, so I kmow it's not medical, but is of the soul.
We all get more chances, Bukowski may already have come back and is getting another chance. My hope is that that I live this life clear enough, painfully enough, lovingly, head on enough, so that I don’t have to come back and try again to be who I really am, for a change :-)
You do know that almost everyone I post on this page was a rascal, right? I don't do puritans. Everyone I post smoked, drank, and danced with the dark. Bukowski just wrote more poetically about it. Fearlessly. It was Paglia who once said: “Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.”
It’s because of what you post here that I come here and tell others in what at write at my blog and Substack to come here :-), because this is the only place I have found online where truth, beauty and love still breathe pretty well :-).
This fell out of me as I was eating breakfast one 1995 morning, totally unaware that the world I then knew would soon cash and burn and I would start life all over, again, and that I would do it several more times :-)
B. was broken in more than one way and I wouldn’t offer him as a life example to others, much less to my offsprings but the sensitivity that transpires from his writings is undeniable. I’m curious of one thing though. Have you found yourself in a situation in which you felt the urge to weep but refrained your tears long enough until they dried out? Did you try in such moments to write something instead (maybe poetry)? Sometimes strange things happen in moments like these. Tears that were supposed to be rolling on the outside, begin to roll inwardly and you get some bizarre awareness and steadiness you didn’t know you had…
No, I have not tried to do it that way, but I can imagine it would be a very powerful spiritual practice, and it kinda reminds me of the movie "Shakespeare In Love", after his lady love was shipped off to America to marry some boring beast of a man at the Queen’s behest, and young Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest” and a storm came up and sunk the ship his lady love was on and she swam to the shore of some tropical island, perhaps Bermuda, and the film ended. All of my poetry has been alchemical, painting my own journey, some very personal, some also applicable to the collective. In late 1993 and early 1994 a lot of poetry came out of me and a lot of tears and snot, too. After that, poems came every now and then, even until now. Two poems came before 1993, one in 1991, one in 1992, which laid the foundation for the rest of my life, I think. Before that, I did not know I was a poet, and quite frankly,, poetry had long kinda terrified me, because I didn’t understand it very well, if at all.
Whatever you are smoking, keep smoking it :-). In some traditions, crows are messengers from the gods, The Great Spirit, etc.
I went through the New Age in the latter 1980s, and some of it was interesting, but it didn’t seem to be what I needed. I think trying to be positive no matter might cause adverse chain reaction in the part of the psyche that feels it really does need to yell and scream, and cry and shriek and rage. I can imagine lots of medical and mental diseases have roots in the blocked psyche.
Obviously, you have no idea that Bukowski was viciously targeted by the Government. Save your judgement for when you can survive what Bukowski survived, please.
I survived the death of my infant son, and several heart breaking divorces, and a really angry bowel that hatched in 1969 and never let up, and being cast out of my family, and being homeless a long time, and homeless again for another spell, and several dark nights of the soul, and a black night of the soul that had me planning to off myself every day for 16 months until it lifted, and I did not turn to booze or other drugs to dampen it. The government did not come after me, yet, but I keep provoking the government on the left and on the right, so perhaps it will come after me, and I will face it stone cold sober, as well, which neither of my parents were able to do. So, I do have some experience with alcoholics and their pain and how they drugged it, instead of facing it stone, cold sober.
We all catch glimpses of our soul (bluebird) now and then.. But once you truly see and acknowledge your "true self", there is no going back to the old way of life (the former things have passed away). As in the Myth of Psyche, you fall completely and utterly in love with your "bluebird", you become wedded to it, and no power or temptation is great enough to keep you away from it, not even alcohol or drugs or other addictions. I believe (and I may be wrong), that any creation like art or poetry, must have been done sober, because alcohol suppresses the soul and enhances the ego, and the ego destroys, it does not create anything of beauty. Not putting down anyone here, but only someone who has suffered at the hands of an alcoholic and had their own spirit broken by one, can truly understand that no good can come from addictions that suppress the soul.
Wow. These lines grabbed my attention this morning:
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
I remember when I did that often because I did not want to address particular fears, insecurities, and anxieties.
I am glad that I found the courage to address them, so that the bluebird in my heart could fly free.
Thank you for offering the poem. 🙏
I don’t weep, do you?
We like to hide when we weep. Because we think no one else wants to see us weep. As secretive as Bukowski's blue bird.
I tear up at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t bother me. But weeping is another matter
To be held while one weeps is just so freeing and requires such trust.
This has always been one of my favorites of Bukowski. Thanks for posting. He was so in touch with reality and his ability to see himself honestly.
Ah the beauty of Buk! The weakness and the vulnerability coming out in bite-size pieces. Enough to help us feel into our own. When there’s nothing else, there is poetry. Give me another shot of whiskey too! 🙏❤️
I found this so beautifully written but it is very dark. Is this metaphor representing the self under the abuse if one’s inner critic or is it stretching out further than that. Does the bluebird represent another relationship? It’s not possible to ignore because it reaches you under the skin.
The bluebird is his soul and as I see it he doesn’t ignore it, he does what men do best… 😉
Which is…?
I think the admin already made a reference to this in a comment on this post 😉
This is beautiful. As a therapist I reflect on how we all have a blue bird that wants to come out. Bravo on this piece!
Sometimes in his most beautiful poems, Bukowski goes into his specific situation, and that is always a letdown for me. Like the line "you want to blow my book sales in Europe?" . It somehow turns the poem applicable to all of us to a poem only for Bukowski.
I always believed those were the most poignant lines in the poem. Bukowski was celebrated as a poet of the underground, a grimy, dark, outlaw poet who was known for booze and whores and street life shenanigans. "You want to blow my book sales in Europe" is Bukowski contemplating and concealing his own vulnerably, his own tenderhearted nature beneath the ragged exterior of his own frayed and jagged persona.
I smiled reading that line.
Or both, no? Us and him. Him and us. Straddling both worlds, all of us.
I feel the particularity makes ghe poem more relateable not less...alluding to ambition and security anxieties (money) putting the bluebird back in its cage
Bukowski was a " TI " like many of us. Or I should say, like myself. No, to survive, to keep the $ coming, one does have to hide the bluebird.
Beautiful and heartbreaking.
Let him out. (The world needs more bluebirds)
I don't weep either.
same.
Yeah, Charles,
I have cried oceans and oceans of tears and rivers and rivers of snot,
and perhaps you should try it, if you're man enough?
Did you ever hear that the heart has its own reasons that reason cannot know?
Did you ever hear that the lungs are the organs of feelings,
and if you smoke cigarettes you cannot know how you really feel about anything?
Did you ever hear that booze alters the mind,
so that it does not work as designed?
Did you ever wonder if the blue bird is your soul,
and you kept her caged in a dungeon your entire life,
because you were terrified of what she might do,
if you simply got out of her way and let her fly and sing?
Is this poem your version of the Merchant of Venice’s sad tale -
You never let your heart sing, or bleed?
You never let your lungs cry?
You never let your blood run?
Because you were trapped in your fear, mind, cigarettes and booze?
I hope you let your blue bird out the next time around,
if there is a next time.
He let it out all the time, don't let him fool you. His poems still reverberate throughout the cosmos. He's achieved more than most "clean", sober minded people. As Churchill once said, which applies aptly to Bukowski: "All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
Based on this poem, Bukowski did not let his blue bird fly and sing as it desperately wanted to do, and he wrote that acknowledgement to the blue bird, but was the blue bird comforted?
It was, as he did let his soul fly through his poetry
Based on the poem, he did not let the blue bird fly, and I take him at his word.
"I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep..."
That's when the writing happened. That's when love happened.
Again I ask, was the blue bird comforted by this poem, or by only being let out at night sometimes?
it’s a beautiful poem, but it also is a very sad poem.
My perspective is affected by having two parents defend themselves and dampen their souls with booze from rising in the morning to turning in at night. I respect Bukowski’s honesty, but if he did not cry, something was very, very wrong.
I agree with you entirely yet I understand his point of view too. How sad this world would be if we would be all alike. Some need to hear from time to time the shards of broken glass that once formed their being, scattering on the floor to make sure they are still alive 😉
And, how AWFUL this world would be if we would be all alike :-)!
But uniqueness is not what humanity, in the main, seems to think is important, given the susceptibility of most people to social, religious, educational, political, etc. robotic programming and needing to belong to this or that herd, which Bukowski did not do, based on all I have read of his at Poetic Outlaws, but for whom, shamefully, I still might not know he had existed. I have to wonder what pain or whatever in him caused him to buffer, even squelch, the blue bird; cause him to buffer, even squelch is pain with cigarettes and booze and, yes, prostitutes?
My mother told me that she started smoking 2 packs of Pall Malls a day at age 15 to. rebel against her Puritan parents, and she got up drinking vodka and went to be drinking vodka, and when she tried to divorce my father, her mother told her, if she went through with it, would kill her (mother). So, my mother buried herself in her church and called off the divorce and contracted lung cancer and it spread around in hr and she got her divorce from my father and her mother and father.
My father didn’t smoke, but he got up drinking vodka and went to be drinking it, and he came unglued when my mother died, and he wept every night for months, as his real feelings overpowered the vodka and everything else in him. But he did not stop drinking for a ver long time, and by then he had morphine topump to relieve pain in his spine, which had suffered from weight beyond its power and medicine’s ken.
I probably should thank my paren for encouraging me not to drown myself in booze, and I never smoked a cigarette. I got to deal with my angry bowel pain head on, and what lies underneath it, for decades, and it still greets me when I wake up each morning, and it accompanies me thorughout the day into the night and bedtime, and even in my sleep. Yet, I know where it comes from, or where most of it comes from, I have admitted what I did to cause it, but what others did I can only indulge, and I take nothing to reduce it, because nothing I ever tried worked, so I kmow it's not medical, but is of the soul.
We all get more chances, Bukowski may already have come back and is getting another chance. My hope is that that I live this life clear enough, painfully enough, lovingly, head on enough, so that I don’t have to come back and try again to be who I really am, for a change :-)
You do know that almost everyone I post on this page was a rascal, right? I don't do puritans. Everyone I post smoked, drank, and danced with the dark. Bukowski just wrote more poetically about it. Fearlessly. It was Paglia who once said: “Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.”
It’s because of what you post here that I come here and tell others in what at write at my blog and Substack to come here :-), because this is the only place I have found online where truth, beauty and love still breathe pretty well :-).
This fell out of me as I was eating breakfast one 1995 morning, totally unaware that the world I then knew would soon cash and burn and I would start life all over, again, and that I would do it several more times :-)
“Sacred Prism”
Earth,
The sacred prism
through which souls are refracted
into their elemental parts,
Purified in Holy Fire,
Then one-forged
and sent on their way
to not even God knows where,
Simply because they are all
Unique Emanations of God,
Evolving . . .
B. was broken in more than one way and I wouldn’t offer him as a life example to others, much less to my offsprings but the sensitivity that transpires from his writings is undeniable. I’m curious of one thing though. Have you found yourself in a situation in which you felt the urge to weep but refrained your tears long enough until they dried out? Did you try in such moments to write something instead (maybe poetry)? Sometimes strange things happen in moments like these. Tears that were supposed to be rolling on the outside, begin to roll inwardly and you get some bizarre awareness and steadiness you didn’t know you had…
Here are the first two poems.
"Living Poets"
Dead poets are poets who never write
Who obey shoulds and oughts
Who live to please others
Who value money over God
Who die without ever having lived
Death is their mark
Dead poets are remembered by the living.
Living poets are remembered by time
Dead poets never sing their song
Living poets never stop singing it
The difference between the two is this:
One worships fear, the other life
To be a dead poet is hard
It requires being someone else
To be a living poet is easy
It only means being myself
One choice is hell, the other heaven
That is what is meant by free will
(1991)
"The Mockingbird"
I happened upon a mockingbird
singing its fool head off –
I asked it how and why it sang?
But all it did was look ahead,
all it did was sing.
It never turned to see if I was watching,
or listened for money jingling in my pockets,
or asked if I liked its music,
or expected a recording contract –
It was too busy singing
to pay any attention to me.
Thus did I learn
the greatest sin of all
is to kill a mockingbird.
(1992)
No, I have not tried to do it that way, but I can imagine it would be a very powerful spiritual practice, and it kinda reminds me of the movie "Shakespeare In Love", after his lady love was shipped off to America to marry some boring beast of a man at the Queen’s behest, and young Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest” and a storm came up and sunk the ship his lady love was on and she swam to the shore of some tropical island, perhaps Bermuda, and the film ended. All of my poetry has been alchemical, painting my own journey, some very personal, some also applicable to the collective. In late 1993 and early 1994 a lot of poetry came out of me and a lot of tears and snot, too. After that, poems came every now and then, even until now. Two poems came before 1993, one in 1991, one in 1992, which laid the foundation for the rest of my life, I think. Before that, I did not know I was a poet, and quite frankly,, poetry had long kinda terrified me, because I didn’t understand it very well, if at all.
wow, nice
I was tempted to chime in something about the blackbird in me,
pecks at my cage always when i'm mid-song
you know the one up with the sun and preaching positive wondrous mindset
like i'm grateful for the tooth ache
and forgiving the jeep that 360ed in my driveway at 3am
the black bird that knows where the knife is
that says homo when i do one of my jete's into the pool
the whole worlds going to shit he caws
and maybe I smile back
tell him on saturday
i'll smoke a cigarette and howl at the moon through the pines
if that will make him happy
Whatever you are smoking, keep smoking it :-). In some traditions, crows are messengers from the gods, The Great Spirit, etc.
I went through the New Age in the latter 1980s, and some of it was interesting, but it didn’t seem to be what I needed. I think trying to be positive no matter might cause adverse chain reaction in the part of the psyche that feels it really does need to yell and scream, and cry and shriek and rage. I can imagine lots of medical and mental diseases have roots in the blocked psyche.
Obviously, you have no idea that Bukowski was viciously targeted by the Government. Save your judgement for when you can survive what Bukowski survived, please.
I survived the death of my infant son, and several heart breaking divorces, and a really angry bowel that hatched in 1969 and never let up, and being cast out of my family, and being homeless a long time, and homeless again for another spell, and several dark nights of the soul, and a black night of the soul that had me planning to off myself every day for 16 months until it lifted, and I did not turn to booze or other drugs to dampen it. The government did not come after me, yet, but I keep provoking the government on the left and on the right, so perhaps it will come after me, and I will face it stone cold sober, as well, which neither of my parents were able to do. So, I do have some experience with alcoholics and their pain and how they drugged it, instead of facing it stone, cold sober.
Ahhh...the Charlie Bukes who tells his 'bluebird' truth, a sweet contrast to his public persona.
That Bluebird of Happiness is always pecking at your soul.
God I love this poem.
We all catch glimpses of our soul (bluebird) now and then.. But once you truly see and acknowledge your "true self", there is no going back to the old way of life (the former things have passed away). As in the Myth of Psyche, you fall completely and utterly in love with your "bluebird", you become wedded to it, and no power or temptation is great enough to keep you away from it, not even alcohol or drugs or other addictions. I believe (and I may be wrong), that any creation like art or poetry, must have been done sober, because alcohol suppresses the soul and enhances the ego, and the ego destroys, it does not create anything of beauty. Not putting down anyone here, but only someone who has suffered at the hands of an alcoholic and had their own spirit broken by one, can truly understand that no good can come from addictions that suppress the soul.
Wow, another hole blasted into the wall of mancastle.
Magical - How can you not love Bukowski? But then, if this poem touches you, maybe its best not to admit it. (Who did the art? Brilliant)