Bukowski, revisited

He pooped it all out. Literally. Didn't discriminate. He readily flashed his unmistakable talent, then his ass, alternately, likely valuing both the same. Sober, drunk, irrational, he made excuses as we do, then let it all go. 

It is always the restless, resourceful reader who plucks out the diamonds from the waste, plenty of both on every Bukowski page. At first, like a street fight, you can't turn away; but later you do just that. He doesn't read as well later. The redundant victim crap gets weaker, familiar darkness now a bit too comfortable for his pained words.

Nothing is fair or meant to be. That's all just an ugly myth of lies. Bukowski tallied up his bad breaks, and created many himself. That's a personal math of self-destruction only he could decipher. The notion of winners and losers gets confused, people aren't that different after all. No one lives on. No one escapes to tell the tale, And anyway, to whom shall it be told? All end up atop the big heap. 

Reveling between extremes, he was a self-mangled meme before his time, before it all went electric, then digital, stored to a cloud. Having mostly missed all that hubris of literary technology. he is yet translated into a dozen languages, his works are found everywhere.

At a critical time, Bukowski helped me rationalize my adolescent delusions. But, then it just took that much longer to face them. It's all freestyle now, the fears change like everything else molts and evolves. Resourceful spider meets the fated moth in every framed mirror of self-conscious desire. You can't make much sense out of it, most days, even the good ones. 

Best to lay low, favor the shade, ignore both doomsayers and saviors on the subject of happiness. Be especially wary of all touted or self-declared experts. In reality, it's always a long, strange wandering to likely nowhere. Paths becoming ours to divine, mostly. 

Bukowski noted the harshest scorecards. His core work didn't change much, first poem to last, but I did change course, many times, seeking true north. How could it be otherwise? Decades can change it all up like that, every atom of action and thought.